The storage business that Toshiba sold at a fire-sale price years ago has now become a major bottleneck restricting the development of the Asian Games esports sector.
On the medal tally of this Asian Games, the Chinese delegation firmly ranks first. A little-noticed episode of the Asian Games is more worthy of attention: esports has officially become a medal event. Most people focusing on esports sponsorship only keep an eye on peripheral brands such as mice, keyboards and monitors. But storage chips are the underlying infrastructure that supports esports as a "digital sport".
On the medal tally of this Asian Games, the Chinese delegation firmly ranks first. A little-noticed episode of the Asian Games is more worthy of attention: esports has officially become a medal event, with 11 sub-categories and 13 small events, second only to track and field and swimming in scale; while storage giant Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) signed on as the "Official Gaming SSD Supplier" and installed the EXCERIA PRO G2 SSD into the competition systems.
Most people focusing on esports sponsorship only keep an eye on peripheral brands such as mice, keyboards and monitors. But storage chips are the underlying infrastructure that supports esports as a "digital sport". In a League of Legends match, every operation of the players needs to complete data reading and writing within milliseconds; in a CS2 showdown, the map loading speed directly determines the tactical execution efficiency. The requirements of esports competitions for latency, read-write speed and stability are forcing storage manufacturers to push consumer-grade products to "competitive-grade" standards.
Kioxia's logic is very clear: the Asian Games esports event is a "real combat field" for it to demonstrate the reliability of its products under extreme load. What it sponsors is not exposure, but credibility. Moreover, the trend of esports being included in the Asian Games and the Olympic Games is giving rise to a track of "tournament-grade digital infrastructure". From storage, network to cloud rendering, whoever defines the standards takes the pricing power.
1. From "Pasting Logos" to "Embedding Hardware"
In the past decade, the logic of esports sponsorship was very simple: brands pasted their logos in exchange for exposure. Red Bull sponsored teams to sell energy drinks; Logitech sponsored players to sell mice and keyboards. These are typical C-end logics, letting consumers see the brand and then place orders on JD.com.
But Kioxia's playbook is somewhat different. Instead of sponsoring a certain team or a certain player, it directly became the "Official Gaming SSD Supplier" for the esports events of the Asian Games, embedding its core hardware into the competition systems. What does this mean? It means that all participating players, all competition devices, and all live broadcast footage are using Kioxia's products. This is not advertising, it is technical certification.
Behind this transformation is the migration of esports sponsorship from the C-end to the B-end. When brands no longer just paste logos, but embed their core hardware into the competition systems, the essence of sponsorship changes from "traffic purchase" to "standard formulation". Through the Asian Games esports scenario, Kioxia proves to global PC manufacturers, game developers and event organizers: "My SSD can run stably under the most stringent competition environments." This kind of credibility is more valuable than any advertisement.
Similar logic is being replicated in other fields. AMD sponsors the LPL (League of Legends Pro League), not to sell CPUs to the audience, but to make game developers and event organizers take the AMD platform as the official recommended configuration; NVIDIA sponsors esports teams, with the core goal of promoting RTX graphics cards to become the default rendering standard for game development. When sponsorship changes from "exposure" to "certification", brands gain not one-time traffic, but long-term industry discourse power.
2. Does Toshiba Memory Want to Stage a Comeback via the Asian Games?
Toshiba is actually the inventor of NAND flash memory technology. As early as 1987, Toshiba invented NAND flash memory, and for a long time thereafter, it was listed as one of the world's most important flash memory manufacturers alongside Samsung and SK Hynix.
The doom of Toshiba Memory began with a costly diversified gamble. In 2006, Toshiba spent 5.4 billion US dollars to acquire Westinghouse Electric, the US nuclear power giant, trying to bet on the global nuclear power renaissance. However, after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the global nuclear power industry entered a cold winter, and multiple projects of Westinghouse Electric suffered severe cost overruns. By 2017, Westinghouse Electric had debts as high as 9.8 billion US dollars and filed for bankruptcy, bringing Toshiba a huge loss of up to 1 trillion yen, directly pushing the giant to the edge of insolvency and facing delisting.
To make matters worse, Toshiba broke out a financial fraud scandal in 2015, admitting that it had inflated its operating profit by a total of 151.8 billion yen over the years, which seriously destroyed its market credit and financing capacity.
In order to fill the huge financial black hole caused by Westinghouse Electric and get rid of the insolvency dilemma before the end of the fiscal year at the end of March 2018 to avoid delisting, Toshiba had no choice but to sell its most valuable asset — the memory business.
In 2018, Toshiba sold most of the equity of Toshiba Memory (later renamed Kioxia) to the "Japan-US-ROK Alliance" led by the US Bain Capital and including South Korea's SK Hynix at a price of about 18 billion US dollars. Although this transaction allowed Toshiba to temporarily retain its listing qualification, it also meant that it completely lost the core bargaining chip to make a comeback in the semiconductor field.
With the advent of the AI era, the demand for storage chips in data centers has exploded, and the independent Kioxia's performance and stock price have skyrocketed. Its market value once surpassed Toyota, making it the company with the highest market value in Japan, while Toshiba, which sold it, was privatized and delisted in 2023 due to operational difficulties.
3. Esports "Competitive-Grade" Storage is an Underrated 100-Billion-Yuan Market
Why have storage chips suddenly become the sweet pastry of the esports industry? Because the hardware requirements of esports are approaching or even exceeding the limits of traditional sports.
In a professional League of Legends match, the average APM (Actions Per Minute) of players exceeds 300, which means that more than 5 precise clicks need to be completed every second. Every click requires completing data reading, instruction sending, screen rendering and result returning within milliseconds. If the random read-write speed of the SSD is not fast enough, "operation latency" will occur — the player presses the skill, and the screen responds half a beat later. On the professional competition field, this half beat is the distance between life and death.
More extreme scenarios are FPS games such as CS2 and Valorant. The competition maps are often several GB in size, and players need to complete map loading within a few seconds at the start of the game. If the sequential read speed of the SSD is not fast enough, "asynchronous loading" will occur — your teammates are already in place, but you are still on the loading bar. This kind of low-level mistake is fatal on the professional competition field.
It is these extreme demands that are forcing storage manufacturers to launch "esports-grade" SSDs. Kioxia's EXCERIA PRO G2 has a sequential read speed of 7300MB/s, a random read-write IOPS of over 1 million, and latency controlled at the microsecond level. These parameters are excessive in daily office scenarios, but are rigid demands on the esports competition field.
How big is this market? According to industry data, the global esports SSD market size was about 5 billion yuan in 2024, and it is expected to exceed 20 billion yuan by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of over 40%. More critically, the gross profit margin of esports SSDs is much higher than that of ordinary consumer-grade products, because "competitive-grade" means higher technical thresholds and stronger brand premium.
Kioxia's sponsorship of Asian Games esports is just the tip of the iceberg. A more far-reaching trend is that the inclusion of esports in the Asian Games and the Olympic Games is giving rise to a complete "tournament-grade digital infrastructure" track.
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Financial Gossip Girl Channel" (ID: baguanvpindao), written by Jian Shan, and authorized for release by 36Kr.