Samsung Electronics announced on Tuesday that it has developed the industry's fastest Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 5.0 solution, designed to enable artificial intelligence (AI) models to run directly on devices without requiring a network connection.

The company stated that its next-generation UFS 5.0 flash memory will deliver industry-leading performance for smartphones and other mobile devices, where it is expected to be deployed as a storage solution.

Samsung Electronics memory product planning executive Choi Jang-seok commented, "In the era of on-device AI, storage devices are evolving into key drivers that define the AI experience."

The company indicated that mass production of the UFS 5.0 flash memory is scheduled to commence in the fourth quarter of this year.

Samsung Electronics stated that this technology sets a new benchmark for the next-generation mobile memory market.

Generative AI is rapidly shifting from the cloud to devices, leading to a dramatic increase in the volume of data that needs to be processed locally. Consequently, storage media is transitioning from primarily storing data to becoming core infrastructure that supports AI computation.

According to the announcement, Samsung's UFS 5.0 achieves a maximum sequential read speed of 10.8GB/s and a maximum write speed of 9.5GB/s. These figures represent a more than twofold improvement over the previous UFS 4.1 generation and can further reduce loading times for large applications and on-device AI models.

While doubling the performance, the new solution also offers an energy efficiency improvement of over 40% compared to Samsung's UFS 4.1.