The second half of 2026 starts the shift to PCIe Gen6 servers, but Gen5 storage will remain important for AI infrastructure as organizations balance performance with budgets in a supply-constrained era. The PCIe Gen6 era will introduce new NVMe SSDs, while Gen5 will support AI inference clusters, KV cache optimizations, and existing platforms. This marks the first major PCIe generation transition since AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa brought PCIe Gen5 to servers in 2022. New CPU families include AMD EPYC Venice, NVIDIA Vera Arm AGI CPU, and Intel Xeon 7 Diamond Rapids (expected in 2027). Since the last transition, the world has experienced 100,000-GPU clusters, and AI inference is rapidly becoming the dominant workload. Storage tiers now range from high-capacity flash for training to high-performance storage in GPU compute nodes and fast shared storage for KV cache and agentic AI workloads. The KV cache workload drives architectures like NVIDIA CMX (Context Memory eXtension), which moves data out of expensive on-accelerator HBM. At data center scale, PCIe Gen6 enables 800Gbps of network bandwidth from a single PCIe Gen6 x16 slot, roughly the speed of 32 PCIe Gen3 NVMe SSDs (128x PCIe Gen3 lanes) per network link, with modern servers having 8-10 of these links. Each GPU might have 800Gbps (or