
Forget San Francisco. One of the biggest winners of the AI boom is in Boise, Idaho, the land of potatoes—and of memory chipmaker Micron.
Micron's sales tripled year-over-year to $23.9 billion in its fiscal second quarter, thanks to red-hot demand for its chips. Gross profit margins swelled to 74.4%, versus 36.8% a year ago. That's what happens when a construction boom of AI data centers causes a global shortage of memory chips and a spike in prices.
Micron is one of top three global producers (along with Samsung and Hynix) of the high-bandwidth memory that's paired with Nvidia's GPUs to train and run AI models. Companies can't get enough of the stuff. And as Micron shifts production to HBM memory instead of the less lucrative DRAM and NAND memory used in PCs and smartphones, prices are rising all around. The "memory crunch" is a curse for consumers who pay more PCs and phones, but a blessing for Micron.
As it scrambles to capitalize on all the demand, Micron is building more chip fabrication facilities. The company's capital expenditures this year will top $25 billion—higher than expected—and executives said that capex in the next fiscal year will increase by another $10 billion,
according to Bloomberg. Investors didn't seem to like that, and Micron's stock fell 4% after hours. Then again, the stock is up 62% this year. And in an industry like memory chips, with a long history of severe boom-and-bust cycles, can you blame investors for taking a little profit in the boom times? —
AO