Tolga Yanik, Emir Yildirim
October 21, 2025•Update: October 21, 2025
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates
Artificial intelligence (AI) machines will produce 1,000 times more data than humans, which will lead to a serious storage supply shortage in the coming years, the inventor of the pen drive told Anadolu.
Datuk Pua Khein-Seng, maker of the single-chip USB memory and CEO of Phison Electronics, stated that he produced the first USB flash drive running on a single chip in 2001.
Khein-Seng, speaking on the sidelines of GITEX Global in Dubai, said he moved onto memory cards after USB production, and now his firm offers storage solutions in the form of NAND flash memory, primarily to be used for computers and other devices.
He said his firm is working on NAND memory controllers and systems, as such memory is used in everything, ranging from computers to cameras.
He noted that every person and system in the world requires large storage spaces, and NAND storage technology will be in high demand in the near future.
Khein-Seng stated that AI applications are thought to be expensive because of the many graphics processing units (GPUs) they require to run but the actual bottleneck is memory, or limited DRAM, but with adaptive layered solutions, the bottleneck can be alleviated with expanded memory space.
“Flash memory will be the only solution to let the AI systems make (an) expansion because memory is under constraint,” he said.
Khein-Seng stated that 99% of people use AI through cloud systems and the US and China lead in cloud AI systems, while other countries lack the capacity to build new cloud AI solutions “because it needs a lot of capital, human resources, talent, and knowledge -- if the world can only use cloud AI from either the US or China, that is a problem,” he said.
He stated that every country would want to develop its own local AI but the costs are high and the skill gap is huge.
He noted that his solution is to build entire infrastructures of AI using flash memory to reduce the cost, and the cheaper GPUs will yield less processing power but they will still process.
“We need a lot of AI blue-collar in this market to help take the open source, customize to every application,” he said.
Khein-Seng emphasized that while Taiwan leads in AI hardware, it is still lagging far behind in AI software.
He added that leading countries in storage technologies are the US, Japan, Korea, and China, while Taiwan has become the fifth country to develop storage systems with its own technology.
