AI accelerators are straining memory bandwidth, capacity and power budgets, and packaging has become a bottleneck for next-generation systems. To answer that pressure, Micron is creating a research organization in Boise, Idaho with a planned $10B budget.
The group’s charter stretches from memory technologies to compute architectures. Packaging and future manufacturing methods also sit in scope, and the company says the effort will run more than 10 years with universities, governments, startups and customers as partners.
Researchers in Boise will plug into Micron operations across the US, Europe, Japan, India, Singapore and Taiwan. The program draws on a patent base of more than 62,000.
CEO Sanjay Mehrotra described the hub as a wager on who will lead the AI economy, contending that America’s AI future rests on memory made in America.
The research budget is separate from the $250B-plus Micron has pledged to US manufacturing and R&D, a program tied to more than 90,000 jobs. Plans call for the Boise site to house hundreds of researchers, with conference and workshop space for the wider ecosystem.
The move has drawn support from Nvidia, Applied Materials, Lam Research and imec, along with Stanford and the University of Texas at Austin. Apple’s Tim Cook also flagged Micron’s history in US chipmaking.
