GMIF 2026: China's daily token calls top 140 trillion, reshaping SSD roles

China's average daily token calls passed 140 trillion as of March 2026, according to Samsung's Kevin Yoon, who spoke at GMIF 2026.

Speakers said AI inference now pushes memory and storage on three fronts: data variety, inference complexity and operational persistence.

Vendors including Silicon Motion, SanDisk and Solidigm are adapting SSDs with QoS-based resource allocation, QLC SSDs in place of some HDDs, and tiered data placement.