• First PCIe 6.0 SSD reaches market availability for hyperscale AI environments
• Micron 9650 targets AI inference with up to 28GBps sequential reads
• Storage performance shifts toward accelerator-fed data pipelines in hyperscale data centers

Micron has declared its 9650 NVMe SSD has entered mass production, making it the first PCIe 6.0 SSD on the market, although the customer list is likely to be limited to hyperscalers and giant AI data center operators rather than everyday enterprise buyers.

The drive arrives as storage architecture adapts to support AI inference workloads that need faster and more predictable data access.

PCIe 6.0 doubles bandwidth compared with PCIe 5.0, and the Micron 9650 uses that headroom to push sequential read speeds up to 28,000MB/s. Sequential write performance reaches 14,000MB/s, while random read performance is listed at 5.5M IOPS and random writes at 900K IOPS.

Not general purpose storage

The focus with the 9650 NVMe SSD isn’t general-purpose storage. The drive is built for environments where AI models operate continuously at scale, pulling data fast enough to avoid stalls in pipelines that depend on retrieval-augmented generation and large context windows.

As data increasingly moves directly between storage and accelerators, higher PCIe bandwidth reduces CPU involvement and cuts transfer bottlenecks.

Power efficiency plays into that equation because data centers can’t simply add performance without considering power limits.

Micron says the 9650 delivers better performance per watt than PCIe 5.0 drives at similar power levels, including roughly double the sequential read efficiency.

The idea is to increase useful work without pushing facilities beyond existing power envelopes.

Cooling requirements are also changing as storage performance rises alongside GPUs. The Micron 9650 supports both air-cooled and liquid-cooled configurations for setups where airflow alone isn’t enough to manage heat in dense AI racks.

Micron spent around 18 months validating interoperability across the PCIe 6.0 ecosystem, running tests with switches, retimers, and extended cable setups before moving the drive into production.

The memory giant previously showed the drive at a number of industry events including DesignCon, FMS 2025 and SC25 to demonstrate how it works within complete systems rather than in isolated tests.

With mass production underway and testing continuing with hardware partners and major AI data center customers, Micron’s 9650 marks the first real step toward PCIe 6.0 storage for AI inference systems.

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