Kioxia Brand Guidelines: Toshiba’s Flash Arm, Renamed for “Memory” and “Value” in 2019

A memory business carved out of a conglomerate, then sold.

Kioxia is a Tokyo memory group whose operating company, Kioxia Corporation, develops, makes and sells NAND flash memory and solid-state drives (SSDs). It is a young company with an old technology. The business began operating on 1 April 2017 as Toshiba Memory Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary that Toshiba set up to hold its memory and related products, according to English Wikipedia. Toshiba itself is much older; its long history, including the war years, belongs to the parent company and falls outside this guide, which begins with the memory business in 2017. The parent has its own Toshiba guide.

What the new company inherited was flash memory itself. English Wikipedia says that in 1984 Fujio Masuoka and colleagues at Toshiba presented a flash EEPROM memory cell at the International Electron Devices Meeting, that Toshiba engineers invented NAND flash in 1987, and that the company brought a 4-megabit NAND device to market in 1991. In January 2014 Toshiba also bought the assets of the SSD maker OCZ Technology Group, adding its drive business to Toshiba’s storage operations.

The carve-out was a response to trouble elsewhere in the group. In December 2016, English Wikipedia says, Toshiba disclosed the possibility of large losses linked to the American nuclear construction business that its subsidiary Westinghouse had acquired, and in January 2017 it said it needed to strengthen its finances. Separating the memory business into its own company made it possible to bring in outside capital.

Toshiba then agreed to sell Toshiba Memory to K.K. Pangea, a company formed by a consortium led by Bain Capital. The sale was completed on 1 June 2018. Toshiba reinvested and kept a large minority of the voting rights, and Hoya took a smaller share; Pangea merged into Toshiba Memory that August. ServeTheHome summed up the result in July 2019: since Toshiba Memory was “no longer owned by Toshiba,” the name had to change.

Kioku plus axia: a coined word for memory and value.

The new name was announced on 18 July 2019 and took effect on 1 October 2019, when Toshiba Memory Holdings became Kioxia Holdings and Toshiba Memory Corporation became Kioxia Corporation. The company explains that Kioxia joins the Japanese word kioku, meaning “memory,” with the Greek word axia, meaning “value.” ServeTheHome reported at the time that the company gave the pronunciation as “kee-ox-ee-uh.” In its own materials the company sets the name in capitals, as KIOXIA.

The name carries a slogan. Kioxia Holdings states its mission as “Uplifting the world with ‘memory’” and says the idea of kioku goes beyond memory as data to take in “experiences, emotions and ideas.” A customer notice from the operating company explained how the change would reach the products: the new corporate name and a new brand logo would appear on product markings, SSD labels and packaging from 1 October 2019 as a running change, and goods carrying the old name would continue to ship alongside the new ones for a period.

The products themselves are named in a plainer, engineering register. Kioxia’s 3D NAND is sold as BiCS FLASH. English Wikipedia lists the generations: 48 layers, commercialised by Toshiba in 2015; 96 layers, announced in 2017; 112 layers in 2020; 162 layers in 2021; 218 layers in 2023; and 332 layers, announced in 2025. Later generations use a design the company calls CMOS directly Bonded to Array, or CBA, in which the memory array and its control circuitry are made on separate wafers and then bonded together.

Alongside the chips, Kioxia makes enterprise, data-centre and client SSDs, and in 2019 it announced XL-FLASH, a low-latency storage-class memory based on BiCS FLASH. It also grew by acquisition: in August 2019 Toshiba Memory agreed to buy the SSD business of the Taiwanese electronics maker Lite-On, and the deal was completed on 1 July 2020, according to English Wikipedia.

How memory makers present themselves.

Memory chips are hard to show. A finished DRAM or flash die is a sliver of silicon sealed inside a black package, and the companies that make them sell mostly to other manufacturers rather than to the public. So memory makers tend to build their visual identity from the stages around the chip: the wafer, the module, the drive and the place where it all ends up.

The wafer is the most common image. A polished disc covered in a tight grid of identical dies, often lit so that the surface breaks into bands of colour, says “scale” and “precision” without needing a product name. Close-ups follow the chip outward: DRAM modules with rows of packages along a green board, SSD circuit boards with a controller and flash packages side by side, and cross-section diagrams that show memory cells stacked in layers, the shorthand for 3D NAND.

The factory is the second theme. Cleanroom corridors, staff in full-body suits and long rows of wafer-handling equipment appear in annual reports, recruitment pages and listing documents, usually photographed in cool, even light. At the other end of the chain come data-centre racks, banks of servers and drives that show where the memory is put to work.

Trade shows give the category its public stage. Memory and storage makers present new parts at events such as FMS, the Flash Memory Summit, and Computex in Taipei, where stands mix wafer displays, product cases and technical posters. Across these settings the typical register is a clean sans, a cool or dark palette with one bright accent, and diagrams in place of lifestyle photography; the guides in this series look at how each maker works within, or departs from, that pattern.

Two plants, one partner and a long road to the stock market.

Kioxia’s route to the stock market took more than four years. It planned a listing in 2020, but on 28 September that year it postponed the offering, citing market volatility and concerns about a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, English Wikipedia says. In 2023 it held merger talks with its manufacturing partner Western Digital; those stalled after SK hynix, an indirect investor in Kioxia, opposed the combination. Kioxia Holdings finally listed on the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange on 18 December 2024. An AFP report that day noted that the company had been expected to list in October before a fall in technology shares pushed the date back, described it as the world’s third-largest producer of NAND flash, and reported that president and chief executive Nobuo Hayasaka rang the bell to mark the debut.

The chips are made in Japan, at two large sites. The Yokkaichi Plant in Mie Prefecture was established in 1992; it first made DRAM and began producing NAND flash in 1999, and NAND became its main product after Toshiba left commodity DRAM in 2001. The Kitakami Plant in Iwate Prefecture, run by Kioxia Iwate, opened its first fab in 2020 and a second in September 2025. Both are tied to a long partnership that began with SanDisk: three joint operations fund the equipment, Kioxia processes the wafers, and the output is split equally between the two groups. Western Digital bought SanDisk in 2016 and spun its flash business back out as Sandisk in February 2025, and in January 2026 Kioxia and Sandisk extended their Yokkaichi agreements to the end of 2034, English Wikipedia says.

Production has had interruptions. English Wikipedia records a power outage at Yokkaichi in June 2019 that disrupted output at the Toshiba Memory and Western Digital flash operations, and, in February 2022, contamination of a material used in 3D NAND production that disrupted work at both Yokkaichi and Kitakami.

The one name now covers a group. Kioxia Holdings, the listed parent, sets strategy, while Kioxia Corporation runs research, manufacturing and sales; English Wikipedia lists group companies including Kioxia Iwate, Kioxia America, Kioxia Europe, Kioxia Singapore and Kioxia Korea. Each carries the same coined word, and the product family, BiCS FLASH, continues a line of 3D NAND that Toshiba announced in 2007 and first commercialised in 2015.

For a design guide, Kioxia shows how a business carved out of a famous parent can build a new identity from one invented word, while its products keep the engineering names they had before. Compare Toshiba, where its flash memory began, and Sandisk, its long-time manufacturing partner. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a muted teal and a pale wafer grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kioxia’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.