Micron’s investing $40B so your next SSD, RAM, or GPU memory chips might be made in the USA

Micron, manufacturer of memory chips for SSDs, RAM, and GPUs, is throwing $40B at manufacturing more chips on US soil.

The investment will total $40B over the next eight years, with first production being expected in the second half of the decade. The exact details of the plan haven’t been announced yet, but the company has said it intends to build up leading-edge memory manufacturing in the states.

Micron is responsible for a chunk of the memory we use in gaming graphics cards today, most notably Nvidia’s enthusiast-grade RTX 30-series GPUs. The RTX 3080, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090, and RTX 3090 Ti all use GDDR6X memory, and the sole manufacturer of those chips is Micron.

SSDs also often use Micron flash memory chips, though mostly we’ll be familiar with its offerings under the Crucial brand. 

We don’t know which part of its business Micron intends to invest most of its cash but one reason for why is the CHIPS and Science Act. Due to be signed into law by President Joe Biden later this week, the act, worth $53B in funding, will widely invest in semiconductors and science businesses—such as Micron, Intel, and even NASA. 

I doubt Biden and his peers were necessarily thinking about gaming PC processors when the bill was thought up—automobile, AI, datacentres were probably higher up the agenda—but the investment in US R&D, design, and manufacturing could eventually mean some silicon in my US colleagues’ PCs won’t have travelled quite so far to reach them as it would today.

Micron seems over the moon with the passing of the CHIPS act, anyways.

“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 US home to the most advanced memory manufacturing and R&D in the world.”