The DRAM and NAND flash manufacturer Micron wants to invest heavily in its home country, the USA. In concrete terms, a total of 40 billion US dollars are to flow into factories for the production of memory chips by 2030. Grants and loans beckon through the US government's CHIPS and Science Act.
By the end of the decade, Micron plans to invest $40 billion to “phase a to set up state-of-the-art memory production in the USA,” says a press release from the world's fourth-largest semiconductor manufacturer. Micron develops and produces DRAM, which is used in memory modules for PCs and servers, as well as NAND flash, which is used as mass storage in smartphones and SSDs.
Many new jobs and fewer dependencies
According to Micron, the largest investment in the storage industry in the USA should ideally create up to 40,000 new jobs. Above all, however, it should strengthen the supply of memory chips in its own country, because the current global crises are causing bottlenecks and insecurity. This is exactly what the US government wants to counter with the so-called CHIPS and Science Act: The program includes state subsidies totaling 52 billion US dollars for the domestic chip industry, which also includes the CPU manufacturer Intel and NAND flash manufacturer Western Digital.
According to Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, the new legislation in the USA should enable domestic memory production to increase the share of domestic memory production in the world market from currently less than 2 percent to up to 10 percent.
This legislation will enable Micron to grow domestic production of memory from less than 2% to up to 10% of the global market in the next decade, making the U.S. home to the most advanced memory manufacturing and R&D in the world.
Micron
What Micron will do specifically with the 40 billion US dollars, that's what Micron wants companies to reveal in the coming weeks. The investments are just part of the much larger sum of USD 150 billion that Micron intends to invest in its global memory production in the current decade.
High promises with a bleak outlook
The huge investment sums are offset by a current sales warning: Micron recently warned that the company had even less turnover in the last quarter, than already feared.