Micron is spending $200 billion to break the AI memory bottleneck

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. BOISE, Idaho—Each afternoon at around 4:30, the earth here shakes from a series of controlled explosions, as engineers blast through basalt bedrock to flatten out the ground underneath a gigantic new semiconductor factory. Micron Technology is the largest American maker of memory chips—the tiny slices of silicon that store and transfer data and help power everything from smartphones and car computers to laptops and data centers.

Micron is rushing to add manufacturing capacity to avert the biggest supply crunch the memory industry has seen in more than 40 years. In Boise, where the company is based, Micron is spending $50 billion to more than double the size of its 450-acre campus, including the construction of two new chip factories, or fabs. The first fab’s inaugural silicon wafers are expected to roll off the factory line in mid-2027, making DRAM, a type of memory used to make the high-bandwidth memory chips, or HBM, that are increasingly essential to advanced artificial-intelligence computing.

Both plants should be in production by the end of 2028. Each fab will be 600,000 square feet—the size of more than 10 football fields—making them some of the biggest “clean rooms" ever built in America. To prepare the site, engineers have already blasted through more than 7 million pounds of dynamite.

An army of construction workers, building contractors and architects have set up a small city’s worth of trailers so they can work around the clock. Each Boise fab is expected to use 70,000 tons of steel (almost as much used to build the Golden Gate Bridge) and 300,000 cubic yards of concrete (enough for four Empire State Buildings). That’s not all.