THE article, published on 5 February 2026, reports that Intel has formally entered into a collaborative agreement with SAIMEMORY, a SoftBank subsidiary, to push the Z-Angle Memory (ZAM) initiative. ZAM aims to create a next‑generation memory standard for AI and HPC that surpasses existing High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) in performance and energy efficiency, with SAIMEMORY handling the primary technical ingenuity and Intel providing technology, innovation, and standardisation.
Headquartered in Tokyo, SAIMEMORY’s work centres on a novel stacked DRAM framework, designed to dismantle the Memory Wall limiting AI scalability. The roadmap lists Q1 2026 for the formal start of joint operations, 2027 for initial Z‑Angle Memory prototypes, and 2030 for full‑scale commercial mass production, a horizon some view as protracted given the pace of AI evolution.
Intel Fellow Joshua Fryman is cited as saying that “standard memory architectures are no longer sufficient to sate the demands of AI,” underscoring the motivation behind the NGDB-inspired approach. The article notes that the AI memory market is currently dominated by SK Hynix and Samsung, with ZAM positioned as a competitive wager against the entrenched HBM ecosystem.