- First PCIe 6.0 SSD reaches market availability for hyperscale AI environments
- The Micron 9650 targets AI inference with up to 28GBps sequential reads
- Storage performance is shifting towards accelerator-fed data pipelines in hyperscale data centers
Micron has stated that 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 buyers.
The drive arrives as the storage architecture adapts to support AI inference workloads that need faster and more predictable data access.
PCIe 6.0 doubles the bandwidth compared to PCIe 5.0, and the Micron 9650 uses that headroom to push sequential read speeds up to 28,000 MB/s. Sequential write performance reaches 14,000 MB/s, while random read performance is rated at 5.5M IOPS and random write at 900K IOPS.
Not universal storage
The focus of the 9650 NVMe SSD is not general purpose storage. The drive is built for environments where AI models operate continuously at scale and pull data fast enough to avoid stalling 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 reduces 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 watts than PCIe 5.0 drives at similar power levels, including roughly twice the sequential read efficiency.
The idea is to increase useful work without pushing facilities beyond existing power envelopes.
Cooling requirements also change as storage performance increases along with GPUs. The Micron 9650 supports both air-cooled and liquid-cooled configurations for setups where airflow alone is not enough to handle heat in dense AI racks.
Micron spent about 18 months validating interoperability across the PCIe 6.0 ecosystem, running tests with switches, retimers and extended cabling setups before putting the drive into production.
The memory giant has previously shown 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 large 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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