Microchip and Micron unveil PCIe Gen 6 storage built for the AI era

At the Future of Memory and Storage Conference on August 4, 2026, Microchip Technology and Micron Technology jointly demonstrated a full end-to-end PCIe Gen 6 storage architecture, combining Micron’s 9650 NVMe SSDs with Microchip’s Switchtec Gen 6 PCIe fanout switches. The result is a system where multiple SSDs can all run simultaneously at full Gen 6 speeds, rather than sharing a constrained bus. What Gen 6 actually means in practice PCIe Gen 6 doubles the transfer rate of its predecessor to 64 gigatransfers per second per lane. Micron’s 9650 SSD is the first PCIe Gen 6 data center SSD to reach mass production, and it demonstrates sequential read speeds of up to roughly 28 GB/s. The Microchip Switchtec Gen 6 switches support up to 160 lanes. They are built on a 3 nm process. The switches also include hardware root of trust, advanced error containment, multicast support, and CNSA 2.0 post-quantum-safe cryptography. Why the AI and cloud markets care Brian McCarson from Microchip framed the announcement around ecosystem cohesion, arguing that storage and switching solutions need to be designed together rather than bolted together after the fact. Larry Hart from Micron linked the anno...