Micron 9650 SSD, the World's First PCIe Gen6 SSD, Reaches a New Shipping Milestone!
Micron, Sunday, February 1st, 2026
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.
This is the story of how we got here, and where high-performance storage is going next. For most of the modern computing era, storage has been expected to do one thing above all else: stay out of the way.
Compute advanced. Networks accelerated. GPUs evolved into engines of unprecedented parallelism. And storage kept pace just well enough to avoid slowing everything else down.
That era is over.