Micron Technology, Inc. Investor update

Satya, please go ahead. Thank you, Christine, and welcome to Micron Technology's webinar on technology and products leadership for the AI era and beyond.

On the call with me today is Dr. Scott DeBoer, President and Chief Technology and Products Officer. AI is driving significant changes in memory and storage requirements. We are excited to have Scott here with us today to provide investors a deeper look at our technology roadmap and innovation strategy. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that today's discussion includes forward-looking statements, including regarding our technology and product roadmaps, investments, and business opportunities. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings for a discussion of these risks. With that, let me turn it over to Scott.

All right. Thanks, Satya, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for this pivotal moment in our industry, where AI is really changing so rapidly and redefining computing. Today I am going to talk about how Micron is shaping that future and making it real at scale. The next era of AI will definitely be won by advancing memory storage and compute together. Micron is in a unique and strong position, leading in bandwidth, capacity, power efficiency, reliability, and increasingly focused on supporting our customers to execute their extremely complex systems going forward. Today I am going to talk on a number of points and try to give you a feel for how Micron is positioned. Definitely, we are in an unprecedented position in time with an opportunity for memory and storage in particular.

Through this first stage of the AI transformation, Micron has executed and delivered extremely well. Micron's technology leadership really is foundational, and I will talk today about that foundation and how it is going to evolve through time. Truly, the differentiated industry-leading products that we have today and that we will have going forward are all built on a core technology leadership position, and that is a focus for Micron going forward. In addition to the technologies that we are creating in our products, AI also accelerates our team members' ability to innovate and execute. This is a major focus of Micron, and I think we are leading the industry in our implementation of AI products and technology capabilities across our whole development roadmap, really from starting physics through design, through ultimately reducing variation in manufacturing and using smart manufacturing, across our ecosystem to ramp faster than we have ever done before.

I'll also touch today on our longer horizon R&D investments that we're focused on to really enhance Micron's future competitiveness. We're making substantial investments and really changing the way that we're looking at longer term R&D investments, from many aspects. I'll give you a feel for some of the things that we're doing there. I've said before, several times, and we've emphasized that co-innovation really is a key part, and it's very different today than it was in the past. Micron's co-innovation with our partners, both suppliers and customers, really are a core piece of how we deliver these leadership solutions and help Micron position itself with the optimal memory and storage, to support our customers' next generation products.

All of this adds up to Micron being positioned to really extend our technology and product leadership the next decade, and we're uniquely positioned, I think, with the strongest opportunity that we've ever had and probably the farthest extended roadmap, in terms of technology and advanced products that I've ever seen in my career. Truly a unique period in time. First, just to touch on a few background pieces relative to where we're at today. The products that we have focused on and are underpinning Micron's success up to this point really have been training-focused and through the first part of this inferencing wave. Really there's a wave of AI increases in memory demand that continually come at us, and we're still in the early innings of the adoption and the evolution of the AI systems.

Each of these is going to drive significant changes in usage and demand on the memory products, not just in terms of bits, but definitely in terms of capability and what type of products in the memory and storage area that we build. It's really an interesting and unique period of time where Micron's technology position can be leveraged to really position the company stronger going forward. When we look across the architecture that supports these waves of AI transformation, Micron's portfolio really goes across all of them. It goes across all of them through time with different types of products, different types of innovations that we focus on with our customers.

Really spans the portfolio from HBM today, in terms of ultra-high performance memory, evolving to custom and then future vertical HBM solutions that I'll talk about today, supporting our customers' needs at the very highest performance levels. In addition to that, we've seen over the past couple years, really the growing importance of high-capacity DDR modules and the exceptional performance that's provided by low-power DRAM in the data center. That continues and expands through the next several years. Our focus, as I'll talk about today, is on making sure that the next generation of both DDR and low-power DRAM modules are truly optimized for what's coming ahead in the AI world. We've had great progress on the SSD front in terms of data center SSDs.

The business and technical teams have really delivered strongly over this past couple years, and that's been noted in our earnings calls and in several other public disclosures relative to our progress on data center SSDs. Today, I'm going to talk a little bit more about what's next in our focus, really in enabling AI class NAND, which is higher performance, different varieties of higher performance NAND products that support opportunities that our customers are looking at, in terms of leveraging that to get better and better performance out of the end systems. Finally, high-capacity SSDs. As we leverage our technology leadership and our cost structure, cost per bit structure of our advanced nodes, higher capacity SSDs continue to be a focus and continue to be a key important point for our data center customers.

Memory is not all just about data center, and the technology and AI implementation into multiple other spaces is critically important as well. A few of those on this slide noted, in terms of autonomous vehicles, robotics, and of course, AI PCs and mobile, all evolving with AI, and all driving unique requirements from the memory technology. What is great AI technology for data center may not be optimized and truly is not optimal for these other edge applications, and we're focused on new types of products across all these edge spaces, and looking at the opportunities with our customers to build optimal memory, across each of these different types of non-data center focus areas going forward. If we look at that first wave, we've had tremendous success in building on core technology leadership to enable a number of industry firsts, and best-in-class products.

These really span across the product portfolio, that I mentioned on the previous slide, driving LPDRAM, in unique ways to have industry firsts and pole position positions with LP-based products. The SOCAMM modules, leveraging LPDRAM, SOCAMM2 modules leveraging LPCAMM, or LPDRAM, have come out and really been a key driver of that part of our business. We've been a leader, of course, in SOCAMM2 and driven the highest densities available in the market with that. On the data center SSD side, we've leveraged our technology leadership and really a long-term partnership, both with customers and an internal focus with our SSD team to enable PCIe Gen 6 first in industry and deliver it into mass production.

Micron's come a very long way from just four or five years ago in terms of our position in really being at the forefront of data center SSDs, and that's something that we're very focused on, and I'll talk a little bit more about today, how we're going to continue that path. This slide highlights a number of other industry firsts that are of critical importance, and of course, HBM4 strength is one of those. As we've mentioned, we're in high-volume manufacturing with HBM4 now. Very successful product ramp, and a world-class product there. Moving on to HBM4E that I'll talk about in the rest of the roadmap as well. One of the most recent accomplishments noted on this slide is our high-density RDIMMs. We've sampled a 512 gigabyte DDR5 RDIMM recently.

It's the world's first module of its sort with exceptional performance and positioning for high-density module optimization and usage by our customers. Again, coming from a position a number of years ago where we were not in a leadership role and have put significant focus over the last several years in making sure that every aspect of this product portfolio is intentionally positioned to take advantage of opportunities with our customers. No question, as we look at the waves of AI coming towards us, that inferencing raises the bar on memory technology. Memory technology is fundamental to how AI works, and I think it's relevant here to just talk about all the touch points as we go through what happens and how in-memory evolves into this and engages into the AI ecosystem.