Micron Technology, Inc. The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2026

Great to see you, Pat. Thank you for having me.

Well, great question, Pat, and that was such a good discussion that we had, and I do agree with you. A year has gone by, but it seems like a very long time in terms of how the world has changed in this last year. Certainly, from the perspective of our customers, a lot has changed. We have gone into a situation where memory is in significant shortage.

Right across all market segments.

We also, despite our best efforts on supply, don't have line of sight today as to when we will be able to have the supply catch up with demand, because demand signals from our customers, and again, across all segments, continue to escalate in every year that we get these projections from our customers. We have a situation where customers are looking at memory in a different way for a few reasons. One is, of course, this big gap between supply and demand. The other, of course, is also that when you think about AI, the performance requirements from the systems are going up. As you think about what makes a system perform at peak levels, at peak capability, it's not just about the processor.

A lot of it is now driven by the performance of the memory, the bandwidth between the processor and the memory, and the capacity of the memory itself. Because these AI models need to be stored in memory, a lot of data has to move back and forth. That performance, that bandwidth between processor and memory, becomes a key bottleneck. Customers are realizing that they need to plan their roadmaps, define their roadmaps with a different approach to memory. Now it is all about how can you design memory to gain a competitive advantage? How can each customer differentiate their system using memory? If it is going to be the same JEDEC-compliant off-the-shelf memory that everyone else is using, as used to be the case a few years ago, then you cannot so easily get that differentiation.

We are working with customers embedded now in their multi-year roadmaps.

That's right. They are now focused on how can we eke out a differentiation?

How can we change the game on our competition? That means thinking about memory in a different way, partnering with a company like Micron to design a different type of capability that then can be used and leveraged. One example I will give you there is what we have done with NVIDIA on LPDRAM in the data center. We were the first company to introduce that capability in the data center, and we were sole sourced in that segment for a long period of time. That is now starting to proliferate. More customers are starting to understand that it is so much better to use lower power DRAM. It helps them through numerous benefits of density, size, performance, and of course, significantly lower power consumption, which is a critical part in the data center.