Micron Technology, Inc. Technology Leadership Forum 2026

Thank you so much. I'm going to need you every 8:00 A.M. to introduce me in the morning. That's a way to wake up. Welcome everybody to our tech conference. It means a lot to us to have you make the time and effort to come here in the second week of August. We know that this necessarily isn't on every one of your plans. We know that you're going to get a lot of great value from it, but from my perspective, we know it takes a lot of effort, and so it's our job to make sure that we put on a great program for you. Also, thank you for giving us the opportunity to work with you.

I see a lot of familiar faces here, some people who've been coming to this conference for the entirety of its 25-year run when it was in Vail and now here in Deer Valley. There are some new faces. For those of you that we actually do formally work with, thank you for giving us that opportunity. For those of you where our relationships are just building, to use a bad sports analogy, just give us a chance to swing the bat. We have some tremendous professionals on the banking research, and throughout the investment bank. We would love to show you what kind of value we can bring and provide for you. I have three quick housekeeping items, just to make sure everybody's aware of. The first is, you should have received an email today to download your app.

Sometimes schedules, meeting places do change, and the best way to make sure that your meetings are happening as efficiently as possible is to download that app. Also, very importantly, that app is going to be one of the ways that we can communicate with you. In the back of the room, I've got Paul DeMarco. Paul is one of the two KeyBank security officers that we have here. He's in charge of physical security. Many of you received yesterday an update that there's fires. The fire is about, I believe, an hour and 20 minutes away. Paul's been in contact with both the hotel as well as the local Deer Valley and Park City fire departments.

Just to put your mind at ease, in case there is anything that we have to do, Paul and the KeyBank's physical security team will make sure that we are getting that message out to you. The message we received yesterday was a blast to everybody within basically a two-hour roundtrip circle. The third housekeeping item is, I know that it's beautiful out on the patio. The sun is shining. The vista is spectacular. But we would encourage everybody, when you have the chance, please come in to see some of the great panels that are happening here, in this room. Gartner has forecasted global IT spending up 13.5% this year, driven by AI. Gartner is also projecting that data center spending is going to grow over 55% this year.

Very few people and very few companies are in the middle of this more than Micron, which is one of the reasons why I'm so excited to invite my friend John Vinh up here to help bring Micron up to talk about some of the trends that they're seeing. With no further ado, John Sumit.

Sure. John, thank you for having me here, and appreciate all of you being here. I'll just start with some quick opening comments. I'll be making some forward-looking statements, so please look at our SEC disclosures for detailed risk assessments on our disclosures. Our business is on a terrific trajectory. Our business and financial performance continues to be exceptional. Since our earnings, our aggregate demand signals from our customers have increased even further. We have said that we do expect these very tight industry conditions to continue beyond calendar year 2027. Based on these increased signals of demand from our customers, we now expect that 2027 calendar year will be even tighter than 2026. Because the growth in demand that is taking shape is faster than the growth in supply for calendar 2027 on an industry basis.

We have been responding to this with significant investments across our global network of manufacturing, especially in key areas like Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore, and investments in India in back-end manufacturing and so on. Our key investments are obviously focused in the U.S. with an increase from $200 billion of investments to $250 billion over the next many years. These investments are also going to be aided by investments in our supply chain. We made this $500 million investment in GlobalWafers for raw wafers. We are also making as part of a $3 billion investment in our supply chain. With all of the efforts that we are doing, we still don't have line of sight as to when the supply is going to be able to meet demand, because demand continues to escalate at a very rapid pace over time.

With those opening comments, I'll just talk to you, John, about the specific question that you asked. Certainly, we have been through many different time horizons and industry conditions that have changed through this time period across many different growth drivers in the industry over the decades. This time feels very different for a number of different reasons. First, AI is a transformative capability that has come on the scene. Of course, AI has been researched and developed and progressed on for many years, decades. But the ChatGPT moment and the whole generative AI field has put it on steroids. I strongly believe we are headed towards artificial general intelligence and beyond that, artificial super intelligence.

That AGI moment is getting closer and closer, in part because AI has gotten so good so quickly that you're seeing these AI improving AI approaches that are accelerating the innovations that our frontier labs are able to bring to the market. This recursive self-improvement capability is super exciting and will create a lot of breakthroughs. What this means is that if you step back and look at the demand picture from a longer-term perspective, we are still in the very early stages of how this demand is going to proliferate. For example, most of the interaction today with AI still happens using chat interface. If you think about the number of users around the world that are going to grow who get access to AI, billions of people over time will be using AI who are not using it today.