IT Hardware Industry: Expert Call Series Takeaways: HBF architecture, applications, & milestones

As part of our 2026 BofA Hardware Expert Call Series, we hosted Sudha Sudharsanan, former President of Nintendo Technology Development, to discuss HBF architecture, applications, and technical milestones. Mr. Sudharsanan has more than 25 years of semis & SoC experience, with particular expertise balancing compute, memory, storage, power, and cost. We view Sandisk as the clearest direct HBF beneficiary, although the opportunity depends on successful technical execution. Mr. Sudharsanan does not expect HBF to replace HBM in training given NAND's slower write performance, lower endurance, and HBM's established role in supporting frequent weight updates. Instead, the initial opportunity is likely within hybrid inference systems, with HBM remaining the fast memory tier for latency-sensitive compute while HBF provides greater capacity for read-intensive data, including model weights, KV cache, prefill data, and indexes. Power consumption, thermal dissipation, write endurance, controller desi