The future of AI infrastructure arrived at the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) 2025 conference, where Astera Labs and Micron achieved a groundbreaking milestone: over 100 GB/s of sustained throughput using production-ready PCIe 6 technology. This industry-first demonstration represents a transformative advancement in AI storage performance, featuring four Micron 9650 PCIe Gen6 SSDs and Astera Labs’ Scorpio P-Series Fabric Switches, delivering a milestone that sets a new bar for AI platform performance.
The AI Storage Performance Crisis
As GPUs become increasingly powerful and AI models grow in size and complexity, the storage infrastructure supporting them must keep pace to avoid becoming a bottleneck. During AI model training, faster storage enables data scientists to ingest massive training datasets more efficiently, dramatically reducing the time required to train new models by ensuring GPUs receive a constant stream of data without waiting for storage I/O operations. This acceleration in data ingestion directly translates to faster model development cycles and reduced infrastructure costs.
For AI inference workloads, high-performance storage enables models to quickly access external data sources that weren’t part of their original training, such as vector databases containing electronic health records, CRM data, or real-time information repositories. When a user queries an AI system—like a doctor asking specific questions about a patient’s medical history—the model can rapidly retrieve relevant context from these storage systems to provide more tailored and accurate responses through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), delivering significantly more value than responses based solely on pre-trained knowledge.
Industry-First End-to-End PCIe 6 Connectivity Performance
Building on our successful DesignCon 2025 demonstration with Micron that achieved 54 GB/s with two SSDs, we’ve now scaled to four Micron 9650 PCIe Gen6 SSDs with two Scorpio P-Series Fabric Switches to achieve over 100 GB/s aggregate performance. This marks another step in expanding PCIe 6 adoption as Astera Labs continues to validate interoperability across an increasing range of endpoints, from storage devices to GPUs and networking components.
The demonstration setup features three Scorpio P-Series Fabric Switches connected to two GPUs and four Micron 9650 PCIe Gen6 SSDs and a direct data path was established between the GPUs and SSDs, bypassing the CPU and eliminating traditional I/O bottlenecks.
Looking at our COSMOS utility telemetry, we can see the system delivers over 100 GB/s of aggregate sequential read performance across the four drives. With nearly double the bandwidth of PCIe 5 technology, this represents a transformative leap in storage performance that enables researchers to train next-generation AI models faster, and provide more insightful and enriched LLM responses through RAG.
COSMOS Utility Output
This demo highlights the transformative potential of PCIe 6 for AI workloads and data center optimization. It shows how optimized data pipelines ensure GPUs are consistently fed data, thereby minimizing idle time and maximizing computational throughput.
From Demo to Production Deployment
By collaborating on real-world demonstrations that validate performance, scalability, and interoperability, Micron and Astera Labs are providing customers with a reference architecture for commercial PCIe 6 deployments.
Through ecosystem collaborations like this, Astera Labs’ full portfolio of PCIe 6 solutions—including Aries 6 Smart Retimers, Smart Cable Modules, and Scorpio P-Series Fabric Switches—enables seamless connectivity across the data center, accelerating PCIe 6 adoption with real-world use cases for modern AI infrastructure.
Experience PCIe 6 Performance at FMS 2025
Visit us at the Micron booth (#107) during FMS 2025 (August 5-7 at the Santa Clara Convention Center) to see our PCIe 6 demonstration in person and meet with our PCIe experts. Ready to accelerate your AI infrastructure? Contact your Astera Labs sales representative to learn more about our PCIe 6 solutions and how they can maximize your GPU utilization.
For more information about our Scorpio Smart Fabric Switch and complete PCIe 6 portfolio, visit asteralabs.com/scorpio.