Micron Technology announced at the Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2026 that its capital expenditure will rise from just over $13 bn in fiscal 2025 to about $26 bn in fiscal 2026 and exceed $45 bn in fiscal 2027.
The spending backs 20 investment projects worldwide, including the Idaho One fab slated to ship its first wafers in mid‑2026, the Idaho Two plant expected to begin output near the end of 2028, and a Tongluo, Taiwan facility planned for 2027. A four‑fab complex in New York, whose construction started in January, targets first production in 2030.
Micron highlighted a pronounced memory shortage across all market segments. Executive Sumit Sadana said the company still lacks visibility on when supply will meet demand.
Memory manufacturing remains complex, with roughly 2,000 process steps per wafer. Wafer processing takes about 3.5 to 4 months, followed by 1 to 1.5 months for assembly, packaging and testing, resulting in an overall five‑month lead time from start of production to customer delivery. High‑bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks 12 chips, while NAND devices now exceed 200, 300 and 400 layers, enabling solid‑state drives of up to 245 TB.
U.S. investment commitments have risen from $200 bn to $250 bn, prompting an accelerated deployment schedule. Micron cited ProPicks IA benchmarks where Super Micro Computer posted a 185% gain and AppLovin a 157% gain after AI adoption.
The expanded capacity is aimed at supporting AI workloads, including humanoid robots that could require hundreds of gigabytes of DRAM and terabytes of NAND storage per unit.
