Micron Begins Mass Producing World’s First PCIe Gen6 SSD: 9650 With Up To 28 GB/s Read Speeds

Micron has commenced mass production of its 9650 SSD, the world's first PCIe Gen6 storage solution with up to 28 GB/s transfer rates.

Micron 9650 - The World's First PCIe Gen6 SSD With 28 GB/s Read Speeds With Both Air & Liquid-Cooled Models

Two years ago, Micron announced the development of its first PCIe Gen6 SSDs. These SSDs were rated at 26 GB/s at the time, but today marks the first official announcement of an actual Gen6-based product that is under production, the Micron 9650. With 9650 SSDs, Micron is promising a 2x speedup in Sequential Read and 40% speedup in Sequential Write speeds (28/14 GB/s). At the same time, the SSDs will deliver up to 2x higher efficiency.

The Micron 9650 SSDs will come in two flavors, the 9650 PRO series and the 9650 MAX series. The 9650 Pro series offers 7.68, 15.36, 30.72 TB capacities & are optimized for read-intensive use cases (1-drive write per day), while the 9650 MAX series offers 6.4, 12.8, 25.6 TB capacities and is optimized for mixed-use cases (3-drive writes per day).

All SSDs feature the PCIe Gen6.2 1x4, NVMe 2.0 interface and are based on the Micron G9 TLC NAND, offering up to 3.6 GB/s IO rate, the fastest ever in a shipping SSD.

Press Release: The Micron 9650 NVMe SSD is now in mass production, the first PCIe® Gen6 drive to achieve this milestone. With this landmark, the industry is at an inflection point, where high-performance storage is no longer optional and architectural decisions around data movement are fundamental to the success of AI workloads.

Today, storage is no longer a background component of infrastructure. It is a determinant of system performance, efficiency, and return on investment. In an AI-driven world where data must move continuously, predictably, and at massive scale, storage performance has become a first-order design constraint.

Why PCIe Gen6 matters

The transition to PCIe Gen6 represents one of the most significant shifts in I/O architecture in years. With bandwidth generally double that of PCIe Gen5, PCIe Gen6 removes a critical ceiling on how fast data can move between storage and compute. The Micron 9650 SSD enters the market as the world’s first PCIe Gen6 data center SSD, delivering massive performance increases compared to prior generations.

Performance type	Micron 9650	PCIe Gen5 SSD	Micron 9650 advantage
Sequential read	28,000 MB/s	14,000 MB/s	100% higher
Sequential write	14,000 MB/s	10,000 MB/s	40% higher
Random read	5.5 MIOPS	3.3 MIOPS	67% higher
Random write	900 KIOPS	720 KIOPS	22% higher

With unmatched 28 GB/s throughput, the Micron 9650 dramatically accelerates AI training and inference workloads. During inference, high throughput is essential to enable real-time data access for large models, such as AI workloads with extended context windows and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines.

As AI systems evolve, data increasingly moves directly between accelerators and storage, minimizing CPU involvement. PCIe Gen6 performance drives this shift by providing the bandwidth headroom required for peer-to-peer data movement in next-generation architectures.

Performance with efficiency

Historically, higher performance often meant higher power consumption. In today’s data centers, that tradeoff is no longer acceptable.

AI infrastructure already consumes a significant and growing share of global electricity, and energy availability has become a limiting factor for expansion. Any storage solution that improves performance but worsens energy efficiency simply shifts the bottleneck elsewhere.

Workload		Micron 9650	PCIe Gen5 SSD	Micron 9650 advantage
Sequential I/O	MB/s per watt read	1,120	560	2X better
	MB/s per watt (write)	560	40	1.4X better
Random I/O	KIOPS per watt (read)	220	132	1.7X better
	KIOPS per watt (write)	36	28.8	1.2X better

This is why energy efficiency is a defining characteristic of our next-generation storage. The Micron 9650 is engineered to deliver industry-leading performance and strong performance‑per‑watt. At the same 25-watt power state, it delivers twice the performance of PCIe Gen5 drives, helping data centers extract more useful work from constrained power envelopes.

The Micron 9650 offers superior performance-per-watt compared to PCIe Gen5 SSDs, achieving better energy efficiency for both random reads and writes. Faster data transfers at the same power result in lower total energy consumption, helping data center operators meet their sustainability goals.

Thermal reality: Why liquid cooling is moving to storage

High-performance PCIe Gen6 SSDs will operate in environments where airflow alone is often insufficient. The Micron 9650 supports both air-cooled and liquid-cooled configurations, recognizing that storage can no longer be thermally isolated from the rest of the platform.

Conclusion: A defining moment for high-performance storage

The Micron 9650 represents a fundamental shift, from storage that tries to keep up to storage that keeps GPUs fed, removing bottlenecks, improving energy efficiency, and enabling AI infrastructure to operate closer to its theoretical potential.

With the Micron 9650 now in mass production and being qualified by key OEM and AI data center customers, the industry takes a meaningful step toward a future where high-performance storage is no longer optional and architectural decisions about data movement are crucial to AI workloads.

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