The 5th GMIF2026 Innovation Summit Successfully Concludes in Shenzhen

• 28 Sep 2026
• TM Team
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The 5th GMIF2026 Innovation Summit successfully concluded at the Renaissance Shenzhen Bay Hotel. Co-hosted by the Shenzhen Memory Industry Association (SMIA) and School of Integrated Circuits at Peking University, the summit, themed "The Future Built on AI Memory and Storage," has brought together industry forces from IDMs, controllers, and memory solution providers to OSATs, equipment and material suppliers, server and AI infrastructure vendors, automotive electronics companies, AI applications developers, academic institutions, and investors. In-depth discussions explored the evolution of memory and storage technologies, industry trends, and application innovations in the AI era.

As AI training and inference workloads continue to scale, the boundaries of memory and storage technology and its applications keep expanding — from storage media and controllers to system architecture and AI applications themselves. GMIF 2026 approached the industry through the lens of the token economy, spotlighting inference efficiency, enterprise-grade storage, cloud-edge-device coordination, industrial capital, and the shifting global competitive landscape.

The summit officially kicked off with an opening remarks from Rixin Sun, President of the Shenzhen Memory Industry Association (SMIA). He looked back on GMIF's growth since its founding in 2019. Now in its fifth consecutive year, the summit has steadily expanded in scale, industry reach, and influence, with its agenda consistently tracking the pulse of the storage sector.

President Sun said GMIF will continue to pursue a more specialized and differentiated approach going forward — staying close to frontier industry trends and supply-chain coordination, while connecting storage companies with adjacent players in AI compute and end-user applications to drive technical exchange, supply-demand matching, and ecosystem collaboration.

Daniel Yen, Executive Director at Morgan Stanley, opened the technical discussion with a look at how generative and agentic AI are reshaping infrastructure demands. As model weight loading, KV cache management, and data read/write scheduling grow more complex, Daniel noted that AI capital expenditure keeps rising — and memory and storage's share of that investment, and its strategic value, are rising with it. He pointed to the "memory wall" as a defining challenge now driving fresh innovation in storage architecture, advanced packaging, and related technologies.

Yimao Cai, Dean of School of Integrated Circuits at Peking University, addressed the topic from the angle of AI inference architecture, discussing the growing role of high-bandwidth storage and multi-media integration. As large model inference drives up demand for capacity, bandwidth, and cost efficiency, Prof. Cai suggested that high-bandwidth flash (HBF) and heterogeneous multi-media storage architectures stand to play a larger role — combining HBM, NAND, and RRAM to strike a better balance between performance, capacity, and cost for AI inference.