Micron Technology Chairman, President, and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said Thursday that artificial intelligence has upended the economics of the memory business, a sector that has historically lurched between periods of shortage and oversupply. “Today there is no AI without memory. AI systems need more memory. They need higher performance memory. They need lower power memory,” Mehrotra told CNBC on “Mad Money.” “So, the value of memory, that equation has totally changed.”
Mehrotra said AI is generating a more durable source of demand than anything the memory industry has seen before, according to CNBC. He pointed to autonomous vehicles, robots, and consumer devices with embedded AI as categories that will consume substantially more memory over the coming years. He added that Micron still cannot produce enough to satisfy current demand. “All our customers across our end markets will buy everything that we make,” he said, adding that data-center customers currently want roughly 50% more supply than Micron is able to commit.
The nature of customer relationships is also shifting. Customers are no longer treating memory as a commodity to be purchased from whoever bids lowest; instead, Mehrotra said they are bringing Micron into product planning far earlier, because memory choices now shape what the finished system can do. As of the company’s late-June earnings call, Micron had already secured five-year strategic agreements with 16 customers, a number Mehrotra said has continued to climb. “They have committed to taking the supply,” he said. “So, this gives us assurance of demand.”
Mehrotra’s comments came the same day Micron unveiled Micron Research Labs, a U.S.-based research institution in Boise backed by a planned $10 billion investment over the next decade. The lab is designed to bring together academic institutions, government agencies, startups, and the broader semiconductor industry to pursue advances in memory technologies, compute architectures, packaging, and semiconductor manufacturing. Micron said it plans to break ground on the Boise facility in 2027, with the campus designed to host hundreds of researchers.
Micron described the new $10 billion commitment as separate from its previously announced plan to invest more than $250 billion in U.S. manufacturing and research and development, a figure the company raised by roughly $50 billion earlier this summer alongside the first concrete pour at its new fab near Syracuse, New York. That facility is expected to become the largest semiconductor manufacturing site in U.S. history, the company said.