The EUV lithography machine from ASML ordered by Rapidus is expected to arrive in Japan in mid-December, according to information from Nikkei cited by TrendForce. This marks the first deployment of EUV technology in Japan, an important step for the country's semiconductor industry as it seeks to establish itself as a major player. Rapidus is currently building a factory in Chitose, Hokkaido, and plans to start mass production of 2 nm chips in 2027. The company also plans to purchase several EUV devices if the 2-nanometer chip production is successful, and intends to build a second production facility specifically for 1.4 nm chips. To support these operations, ASML will establish a service center in Chitose City.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang hinted at the possibility of outsourcing AI chip production to Rapidus. As of October, construction progress on the Rapidus facility, which began in September 2023, is up to 63% and remains on track. In addition to Rapidus, Micron's Hiroshima plant is scheduled to install EUV equipment in 2025, allowing for mass production in 2026. JASM, a TSMC subsidiary in Japan, plans to integrate EUV lithography with a second wafer plant in 2027 that will have a 6 nm production line.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced it has begun qualification of the 6550 ION NVMe SSD with customers. The Micron 6550 ION is the world's fastest 60 TB data center SSD and the industry's first E3.S and PCIe Gen 5 60 TB SSD. It follows the success of the award-winning 6500 ION and is engineered to provide best-in-class performance, energy efficiency, endurance, security, and rack density for exascale data center deployments. The 6550 ION excels in high-capacity NVMe workloads such as networked AI data lakes, ingest, data preparation and check pointing, file and object storage, public cloud storage, analytic databases, and content delivery.

"The Micron 6550 ION achieves a remarkable 12 GB/s while using just 20 watts of power, setting a new standard in data center performance and energy efficiency," said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron's Data Center Storage Group. "Featuring a first-to-market 60 TB capacity in an E3.S form factor and up to 20% better energy efficiency than competitive drives, the Micron 6550 ION is a game-changer for high-capacity storage solutions to address the insatiable capacity and power demands of AI workloads."

Micron Technology today announced that it is releasing its Crucial DDR5 Pro Overclocking (OC) gaming memory with new speeds of 6,400 megatransfers per second (MT/s) to provide a smoother, faster gaming experience. This product update follows its initial February release of the gaming memory solution, which ran at 6,000 MT/s. The Crucial DDR5 Pro OC Gaming Memory's new higher speed enables gaming at higher frame rates per second, accelerates multitasking and boosts productivity.

The updated gaming memory offers twice the data rates of DDR4 and 25% lower latency for seamless, rapid-fire gameplay. Underpinned by Micron's cutting-edge DRAM innovation, the DDR5 Pro OC Gaming Memory solution is built using Micron's sophisticated 1ß (1-beta) node technology to deliver performance gains, quality and reliability.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced that its 9550 PCIe Gen 5 E1.S data center SSDs have been added to the NVIDIA recommended vendor list (RVL) for the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system and its derivatives. The GB200 NVL72 uses the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip to deliver rack-scale, energy-efficient AI infrastructure. The enablement of PCIe Gen 5 storage in the system makes the Micron 9550 SSD an ideal fit for optimizing performance and power efficiency in AI workloads like large-scale training of AI models, real-time trillion-parameter language model inference and high-performance computing (HPC) tasks.

Micron 9550 delivers world-class AI workload performance and power efficiency:
Compared with other industry offerings, the 9550 SSD delivers up to 34% higher throughput for NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect (GDS) and up to 33% faster workload completion times in graph neural network (GNN) training with Big Accelerator Memory (BaM). The Micron 9550 SSD saves energy and sets new sustainability benchmarks by consuming 81% less SSD energy per 1 TB transferred than other SSD offerings with NVIDIA Magnum IO GDS and up to 43% lower SSD power in GNN training with BaM.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced the availability of a brand-new category of clock driver memory with the launch of its Crucial DDR5 clocked unbuffered dual inline memory modules (CUDIMM) and clocked small outline dual memory modules (CSODIMM), which are now shipping in volume. The JEDEC-standard solutions run at speeds up to 6,400 MT/s (megatransfers per second), more than twice as fast as DDR4 and 15% faster than traditional non-clock-driver-based DDR5. Designed to provide more speed stability, faster downloads and better refresh rates, these solutions represent a completely new frontier of memory form factors for next-generation PCs. Micron's CUDIMM and CSODIMM solutions are the industry's first commercially available JEDEC-standard DDR5 CUDIMM and CSODIMM solutions to hit the market since JEDEC standardized the specification earlier this year.

In addition, Intel has validated Micron DDR5 CUDIMM and CSODIMM solutions up to capacities of 64 gigabytes (GB) for use with its Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2), which were launched last week on Oct. 10.

Today, Micron updated its corporate logo with new symbolism. The redesign comes as Micron celebrates over four decades of technological advancement in the semiconductor industry. The new logo features a distinctive silicon color, paying homage to the wafers at the core of Micron's products. Its curved lettering represents the company's ability to stay ahead of industry trends and adapt to rapid technological changes. The design also incorporates vibrant gradient colors inspired by light reflections on wafers, which are the core of Mircorn's memory and storage products.

This rebranding effort coincides with Micron's expanding role in AI, where memory and storage innovations are increasingly crucial. The company has positioned itself beyond a commodity memory supplier, now offering leadership in solutions for AI data centers, high-performance computing, and AI-enabled devices. The company has come far from its original 64K DRAM in 1981 to HBM3E DRAM today. Micron offers different HBM memory products, graphics memory powering consumer GPUs, CXL memory modules, and DRAM components and modules.

According to a recent Reuters report, the US government, under Biden's administration, will allow a few criteria-matching semiconductor fabs to circumvent environmental protection laws. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed legislation that effectively enables these fabs to not follow the strict regulations designed for maximum preservation of the environment. The Semiconductor Industry Association has noted that without this new legislation, companies that are extending facilities on US soil would be significantly slowed down due to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969. The CHIPS Act's primary force driver isn't just domestic production but near-future completion so that future geopolitical shifts don't impact US companies. The speed of getting permits to manufacture advanced chips is essential for every CHIPS Act recipient company, like Intel, Samsung, TSMC, and Micron.

Micron Technology, Inc. today announced results for its fourth quarter and full year of fiscal 2024, which ended August 29, 2024.

Fiscal Q4 2024 highlights

• Revenue of $7.75 billion versus $6.81 billion for the prior quarter and $4.01 billion for the same period last year
• GAAP net income of $887 million, or $0.79 per diluted share
• Non-GAAP net income of $1.34 billion, or $1.18 per diluted share
• Operating cash flow of $3.41 billion versus $2.48 billion for the prior quarter and $249 million for the same period last year

Fiscal 2024 highlights

• Revenue of $25.11 billion versus $15.54 billion for the prior year
• GAAP net income of $778 million, or $0.70 per diluted share
• Non-GAAP net income of $1.47 billion, or $1.30 per diluted share
• Operating cash flow of $8.51 billion versus $1.56 billion for the prior year

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced the availability of the Crucial P310 2280 Gen 4 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), which offers two times faster performance than Gen 3 SSDs and 40% faster performance than Crucial's P3 Plus, giving gamers, students and creatives a boost in speed when they boot and use data-intensive applications. With capacities up to 2 terabytes (TB) and read and write speeds of 7,100 and 6,000 megabytes per second (MB/s) respectively, the P310 2280 SSD enables more customers than ever to gain access to gaming performance without paying gaming prices. This launch expands Micron's P310 portfolio to address PCs, laptops and PlayStation 5, closely following the July launch of its award-winning Crucial P310 2230 SSD, which is targeted at users of handheld gaming consoles and mini PCs.

"Micron's Crucial P310 2280 SSD delivers blazing fast gaming-level speeds, allowing users to do it all faster — from gaming to booting Windows to running multiple creative apps at the same time — without compromising on quality," said Jonathan Weech, senior director of product marketing for Micron's Commercial Products Group. "Architected with our advanced 3D NAND technology and optimized to deliver the utmost power efficiency, the 2280 SSD empowers everyone from gamers to creatives to squeeze more out of their battery life when using data-rich apps."

TrendForce's latest reports reveal that the second quarter of 2024 saw a significant increase in demand for enterprise SSDs due to the increased deployment of NVIDIA GPU platforms and rising storage needs driven by AI applications, along with a surge in demand from server brands. The surge in demand for high-capacity SSDs for AI applications—coupled with suppliers' inability to adjust capacity in the first half of the year—resulted in a supply shortage that drove average enterprise SSD prices up by more than 25% QoQ. This price increase led to a revenue growth of over 50% for suppliers.

Looking ahead to the third quarter, demand from North American CSP customers continues to rise, and server brands show no signs of slowing down their orders, further boosting procurement volumes of enterprise SSD. With supply shortages persisting into the third quarter, TrendForce forecasts a 15% increase in contract prices compared to the previous quarter, with supplier revenues expected to grow by nearly 20%.

TrendForce reports that NAND Flash prices continued to rise in 2Q24 as server inventory adjustments neared completion and AI spurred demand for high-capacity storage products. However, high inventory levels among PC and smartphone buyers led to a 1% QoQ decline in NAND Flash bit shipments. Despite this, ASP increased by 15% and drove total revenue to US$16.796 billion, a 14.2% growth compared to the previous quarter.

All NAND Flash suppliers returned to profitability starting in the second quarter and are expanding capacity in the third quarter to meet strong demand from AI and server markets. However, weaker-than-expected PC and smartphone sales in the first half of the year are likely to constrain NAND Flash shipment growth.

Micron has been on a spending spree in Taiwan, where the company has been looking for new facilities. Micron has agreed to buy no less than three LCD plants from display maker AUO, which are located in the central Taiwanese city of Taichung. Micron is looking at paying NT$ 8.1 billion (~US$253.3 million). Initially, Micron was interested in buying another plant in Tainan from Innolux, but was turned down, so Micron turned to AUO for the purchases. Earlier this year, TSMC spent NT$17 billion (~US$531.6 million) to buy a similar facility from Innolux, but it seems that Innolux wasn't willing to part with any more facilities this year.

The three AUO plants are said to have produced LCD colour filters and the two of the plants had closed for production earlier this month. However, it appears that for some reason, the plant that is still in operation, will be leased by AUO and the company will continue production of colour filters in the factory. The larger plant measures 146,033 square metres, with the smaller measuring 32,500 square metres. As for Micron's plans, not much is known at this point in time, but the company has announced that it's planning on using at least some of the space for front-end wafer testing and that the new plants will support its current and upcoming DRAM production fabs in Taichung and Taoyuan, which the company is currently expanding. Market sources in Taiwan are quoted as saying that the focus will be on HBM memory, due to the high demand from various AI products in the market, least not from NVIDIA. The deal is expected to be finalised by the end of the year.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced it is the first to develop PCIe Gen 6 data center SSD technology for ecosystem enablement as part of a portfolio of memory and storage products to support the broad demand for AI. Addressing these demands, Raj Narasimhan, senior vice president and general manager of Micron's Compute and Networking Business Unit, will present a keynote at FMS titled, "Data is at the heart of AI: Micron memory and storage are fueling the AI revolution," on Wednesday, Aug. 7, at 11:00 a.m. Pacific time. The session will focus on how Micron's industry-leading products are impacting AI system architectures while enabling faster and more power-efficient solutions to manage vast data sets.

At FMS, Micron will demonstrate that it is the first to develop a PCIe Gen 6 SSD for ecosystem enablement, once again showcasing its storage technology leadership. By making this technology — which delivers sequential read bandwidths of over 26 GB/s — available to partners, Micron is kickstarting the PCIe Gen 6 ecosystem. This achievement builds on Micron's recent announcement of the world's fastest data center SSD, the Micron 9550, and further bolsters Micron's leadership position in AI storage.

SK hynix is reportedly developing 400-layer NAND flash memory, with plans to begin mass production by late 2025. The company is collaborating with supply chain partners to develop the necessary process technologies and equipment for 400-layer and higher NAND chips. This information comes from a recent article by Korean media outlet etnews citing industry sources.

SK hynix intends to use hybrid bonding technology to achieve this, which is expected to bring new packaging materials and components suppliers into the supply chain. The development process involves exploring new bonding materials and various technologies for connecting different wafers, including polishing, etching, deposition, and wiring. SK hynix aims to have the technology and infrastructure ready by the end of next year.

Micron Technology, Inc., announced today that it is shipping ninth-generation (G9) TLC NAND in SSDs, making it the first in the industry to achieve this milestone. Micron G9 NAND features the industry's highest transfer speed of 3.6 GB/s, delivering unsurpassed bandwidth for reading and writing data. The new NAND enables best-in-class performance for artificial intelligence (AI) and other data-intensive use cases from personal devices and edge servers to enterprise and cloud data centers.

"The shipment of Micron G9 NAND is a testament to Micron's prowess in process technology and design innovations," said Scott DeBoer, executive vice president of Technology and Products at Micron. "Micron G9 NAND is up to 73% denser than competitive technologies in the market today, allowing for more compact and efficient storage solutions that benefit both consumers and businesses."

Marvell Technology, Inc., a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, today launched the Marvell Structera product line of Compute Express Link (CXL) devices that enable cloud data center operators to overcome memory performance and scaling challenges in general-purpose servers.

To address memory-intensive applications, data center operators add extra servers to get higher memory bandwidth and higher memory capacity. The compute capabilities from the added processors are typically not utilized for these applications, making the servers inefficient from cost and power perspectives. The CXL industry standard addresses this challenge by enabling new architectures that can efficiently add memory to general-purpose servers.

Intel Corporation today announced the appointment of Dr. Naga Chandrasekaran as chief global operations officer, executive vice president and general manager of Intel Foundry Manufacturing and Supply Chain organization. Chandrasekaran joins Intel from Micron, where he served as senior vice president for Technology Development. He will be a member of Intel's executive leadership team and report to CEO Pat Gelsinger.

Chandrasekaran succeeds Keyvan Esfarjani, who has decided to retire from Intel after nearly 30 years of dedicated service. Esfarjani's distinguished career set a strong foundation for Intel Foundry, and his leadership in global supply chain resilience and manufacturing excellence has helped to position Intel's business for long-term success. He will remain with Intel through the end of the year to ensure a seamless transition.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced availability of the Micron 9550 NVMe SSD - the world's fastest data center SSD and industry leader in AI workload performance and power efficiency. The Micron 9550 SSD showcases Micron's deep expertise and innovation by integrating its own controller, NAND, DRAM and firmware into one world-class product. This integrated solution enables class-leading performance, power efficiency and security features for data center operators.

The Micron 9550 SSD delivers best-in-class performance with 14.0 GB/s sequential reads and 10.0 GB/s sequential writes to provide up to 67% better performance over similar competitive SSDs and enables industry-leading performance for demanding workloads such as AI. In addition, its random reads of 3,300 KIOPS are up to 35% better and random writes of 400 KIOPS are up to 33% better than competitive offerings.

Chinese memory manufacturer YMTC has filed a lawsuit against U.S.-based Micron in California, alleging infringement of 11 patents related to 3D NAND Flash and DRAM products. YMTC seeks to halt Micron's sales of the allegedly infringing products in the U.S. and demands royalty payments. Founded in Wuhan, China, in 2016, YMTC is a key player in China's efforts to develop a domestic chip industry. However, in October 2022, the U.S. government placed YMTC on its Entity List, restricting its access to advanced U.S. manufacturing equipment for 3D NAND chips with 128 layers or more.

Before these restrictions, YMTC had obtained certification from Apple for its 128-layer 3D NAND chips, with the US tech giant considering using YMTC chips to reduce costs and diversify its supply chain beyond Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. The lawsuit specifically targets Micron's 3D NAND Flash products with 96, 128, 176, and 232 layers, as well as certain DDR5 SDRAM products. This legal action follows a similar suit filed by YMTC against Micron in November, alleging infringement of eight U.S. patents related to 3D NAND Flash. With government backing, Chinese firms are increasingly engaging in patent litigation both domestically and internationally. Last year alone, Chinese courts handled over 5,000 technical intellectual property and monopoly cases.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced the availability of the Crucial P310 2230 Gen 4 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), which empowers enthusiasts of handheld gaming and users of mini PCs and ultrathin laptops to store more games and data-intensive content at their fingertips without sacrificing speed or performance. With read and write speeds of 7,100 and 6,000 megabytes per second (MB/s), respectively, and capacities up to 2 terabytes (TB), the P310 2230 SSD packs a unique punch, offering high performance and capacity in a compact, power-efficient form factor.

"Today's contemporary games are storage- and performance-hungry, and this is especially true for handheld gamers who want to be able to quickly access all their favorite games at their fingertips," said Jonathan Weech, senior director of product marketing for Micron's Commercial Products Group. "We've built our Crucial P310 2230 Gen 4 SSD to satisfy this need for speed and more capacity, providing a dynamic, power-efficient SSD that allows gamers to build their dream gaming libraries, load multiworld games faster and extend battery life for a richer gaming experience on the go."

TrendForce's latest industry report on AI servers reveals that high demand for advanced AI servers from major CSPs and brand clients is expected to continue in 2024. Meanwhile, TSMC, SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron's gradual production expansion has significantly eased shortages in 2Q24. Consequently, the lead time for NVIDIA's flagship H100 solution has decreased from the previous 40-50 weeks to less than 16 weeks.

TrendForce estimates that AI server shipments in the second quarter will increase by nearly 20% QoQ, and has revised the annual shipment forecast up to 1.67 million units—marking a 41.5% YoY growth.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced it is now sampling its multiplexed rank dual inline memory module (MRDIMMs). The MRDIMMs will enable Micron customers to run increasingly demanding workloads and obtain maximum value out of their compute infrastructure. For applications requiring more than 128 GB of memory per DIMM slot, Micron MRDIMMs outperform current TSV RDIMMs by enabling the highest bandwidth, largest capacity with the lowest latency and improved performance per watt to accelerate memory-intensive virtualized multi-tenant, HPC and AI data center workloads.1 The new memory offering is the first generation in the Micron MRDIMM family and will be compatible with Intel Xeon 6 processors.

"Micron's latest innovative main memory solution, MRDIMM, delivers the much-needed bandwidth and capacity at lower latency to scale AI inference and HPC applications on next-generation server platforms," said Praveen Vaidyanathan, vice president and general manager of Micron's Compute Products Group. "MRDIMMs significantly lower the amount of energy used per task while offering the same reliability, availability and serviceability capabilities and interface as RDIMMs, thus providing customers a flexible solution that scales performance. Micron's close industry collaborations ensure seamless integration into existing server infrastructures and smooth transitions to future compute platforms."

Micron has announced more precise timeframes for the commencement of operations at its two new memory facilities in the United States during its Q3 FY2024 results presentation. The company expects these fabs, located in Idaho and New York, to begin production between late 2026 and 2029. The Idaho fab, currently under construction near Boise, is slated to start operations between September 2026 and September 2027. Meanwhile, the New York facility is projected to come online in the calendar year 2028 or later, pending the completion of regulatory and permitting processes. These timelines align with Micron's original plans announced in 2022 despite recent spending optimizations. The company emphasizes that these investments are crucial to support supply growth in the latter half of this decade.

Micron's capital expenditure for FY2024 is set at approximately $8 billion, with a planned increase to around $12 billion in FY2025. This substantial rise in spending, targeting a mid-30s percentage of revenue, will support various technological advancements and facility expansions. A substantial portion of this increased investment - over $2 billion - will be dedicated to constructing the new fabs in Idaho and New York. Additional funds will support high-bandwidth memory assembly and testing, as well as the development of other fabrication and back-end facilities. Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron's CEO, underscored the importance of these investments, stating that the new capacity is essential to meet long-term demand and maintain the company's market position. He added that these expansions, combined with ongoing technology transitions in Asian facilities, will enable Micron to grow its memory bit supply in line with industry demand.

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) today announced results for its third quarter of fiscal 2024, which ended May 30, 2024.

Fiscal Q3 2024 highlights

• Revenue of $6.81 billion versus $5.82 billion for the prior quarter and $3.75 billion for the same period last year
• GAAP net income of $332 million, or $0.30 per diluted share
• Non-GAAP net income of $702 million, or $0.62 per diluted share
• Operating cash flow of $2.48 billion versus $1.22 billion for the prior quarter and $24 million for the same period last year

"Robust AI demand and strong execution enabled Micron to drive 17% sequential revenue growth, exceeding our guidance range in fiscal Q3," said Sanjay Mehrotra, President and CEO of Micron Technology. "We are gaining share in high-margin products like High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), and our data center SSD revenue hit a record high, demonstrating the strength of our AI product portfolio across DRAM and NAND. We are excited about the expanding AI-driven opportunities ahead, and are well positioned to deliver a substantial revenue record in fiscal 2025."

Competition among Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron is intensifying, with a focus on enhancing processing speed and efficiency in graphics DRAM (GDDR) for AI accelerators and cryptocurrency mining. Compared with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), the GDDR7 has a faster data processing speed and a relatively low price. Since Nvidia is expected to use next-generation GDDR7 with its GeForce RTX50 Blackwell GPUs, competition will likely be as strong as the demand. We can see that by looking, for example, at the pace of new GDDR7 releases from the past two years.

In July 2022, Samsung Electronics developed the industry's first 32 Gbps GDDR7 DRAM, capable of processing up to 1.5 TB of data per second, a 1.4 times speed increase and 20% better energy efficiency compared to GDDR6. In February 2023, Samsung demonstrated its first GDDR7 DRAM with a pin rate of 37 Gbps. On June 4, Micron launched its new GDDR7 at Computex 2024, with speeds up to 32 Gbps, a 60% increase in bandwidth, and a 50% improvement in energy efficiency over the previous generation. Shortly after, SK Hynix introduced a 40 Gbps GDDR7, showcased again at Computex 2024, doubling the previous generation's bandwidth to 128 GB per second and improving energy efficiency by 40%.