Memory chips are at the center of all devices, helping store and access data in smartphones, computers and the servers training generative artificial intelligence models.
Just three companies make more than 90% of the world’s dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, chips. With Samsung and SK Hynix both headquartered in South Korea, Idaho-based Micron is the only manufacturer in the U.S. — that has made it the latest target of China’s bans on U.S. technologies.
About a quarter of Micron’s revenue comes from China, and “about half that revenue is at risk,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in an interview.
Meanwhile, Micron is doubling down on U.S. manufacturing. Its current leading-edge chips are made in Japan and Taiwan, but Micron is aiming to bring advanced memory production to the U.S. starting in 2026 with a new $15 billion chip fabrication plant in Boise, Idaho. Micron celebrated its 45th anniversary in October by pouring the first cement at the new fab.
The facility is located next to Micron’s huge research and development facility, where CNBC got a behind-the-scenes tour.
Micron’s existing research and development facility in Boise, Idaho, shown here on Oct. 6, 2023.
Ben Farrar
“Memory is very cost-sensitive and we have to get economies of scale to mass produce our chips on a level that meets the market demands,” said Scott Gatzemeier, Micron’s corporate vice president of front end U.S. expansion.
DRAM and NAND memory chips are a cheaper type of semiconductor than the high-powered central processing units from Intel and AMD and graphics processing units that sparked Nvidia’s growth. But multiple memory chips are needed to support each GPU or CPU, so making memory requires more fab space.
That’s why Micron is planning the biggest chip project in U.S. history, spending $100 billion over 20 years to build four 600,000 square foot fabs in upstate New York.
Mehrotra told CNBC that Micron’s goal is to vastly increase the U.S. share of DRAM production, which he said currently sits at just 2%. That production comes from Micron’s fab in Manassas, Virginia. The company is getting assistance from the federal CHIPS and Science Act, which offers billions of dollars to incentivize domestic production.
“With Micron’s investments through CHIPS support in Boise, Idaho, as well as in Syracuse, New York, that 2% over the course of nearly 20 years will be changing to about 15% of the worldwide production coming from the U.S.,” Mehrotra said.
The U.S. share of overall chip manufacturing has plummeted from 37% to 12% in the last three decades, largely because it costs at least 20% more to build and operate a new fab in the U.S. than in Asia. Labor is also cheaper there, the supply chain is more accessible and government incentives have been far greater. That’s why the CHIPS and Science Act set aside $52.7 billion for companies that manufacture in the U.S.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., co-sponsored the bill.
“When it came to chips so essential to everything we do, we had lost that edge,” Schumer told CNBC in an interview. “And if we didn’t get back that edge, not just on chips but on science broadly, we would no longer be the No. 1 economic power in the world.”
Micron and at least 460 other companies have applied for funds from the CHIPS Act. States are also offering incentives to entice chip companies. Micron told CNBC it’s eligible for up to $5.5 billion from the state of New York for the four fabs it’s building just north of Syracuse. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the state’s Green CHIPS Act into law last year.
“If they hadn’t passed the CHIPS and Science Act first, I don’t think it would have been as many incentives as necessary,” Hochul said. “I knew I had to woo them, talk about our incentives, but also we get out of it 50,000 jobs. That’s a good deal for us any day of the week.”
These promises come on the heels of a major price slump for memory chips, which led to layoffs at Micron and SK Hynix, and resulted in Samsung slashing production. Now, Micron is betting big that the memory market will grow.
“The large language learning models and other things like that continue to increase large demand,” Gatzemeier said.
“We’re now moving into things like FaceTime, higher resolution images, movies on demand,” he said. “All of that requires more and more memory to be made available.”
Micron says construction in New York will begin at the end of 2024 and chip production there will start in 2027. With both Idaho and New York fabs online, Mehrotra told CNBC that Micron plans to increase the share of chips it makes in the U.S. from 10% to nearly 60% in the next two decades.
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra shows CNBC’s Katie Tarasov a 300mm silicon wafer at the memory company’s San Jose office on Oct. 2, 2023.
Kent Kessinger
‘Feast or famine’
Micron was founded in 1978 by three chip engineers, along with one of their twin brothers, in the basement of a dental office in Boise. By 1980, it was building its first fab and a year later was pumping out a revolutionarily small 64K DRAM chip. These chips, used for storing bits of data that can be quickly accessed by a CPU, ended up in many of the early PCs.
Gatzemeier, who joined as an intern in 1997, explained the two main kinds of memory: DRAM and NAND.
DRAM is “volatile memory, which means that when the power is removed, it loses all of its information. It’s very fast but has to be, and it sits near the CPU and it’s used for real-time processing,” he said. “NAND flash memory is what’s in your SSDs or your storage cards. And NAND flash is nonvolatile, meaning it’ll still store your memory even when the power’s removed.”
Micron went public in 1984. Memory was a crowded field, but over the years, it has whittled down to just three top players.
“The name of the game is high performance and low cost at the same time,” said Patrick Moorhead, CEO of Moor Insights and Strategy. “Otherwise, you’re going to be blasted out of the market.”
When it comes to the biggest type of memory, DRAM, Samsung is by far the leader, followed by SK Hynix and then Micron. Micron has made 11 acquisitions since 1998, including Texas Instruments‘ memory division, Numonyx, Elpida and Inotera.
“For a very long period, they had not invested in a new fab,” said Gaurav Gupta, an analyst at Gartner. “But they were still able to retain their market share by acquiring other smaller memory firms, which were either going out of business or bankrupt.”
Unlike many kinds of chips, memory wasn’t in short supply during the chip shortage. Micron and its competitors saw a major upswing in the pandemic-fueled boom in consumer electronics. Micron’s profits then fell significantly due to weakened demand for PCs and smartphones and a chip oversupply that led to lower prices. It’s a downturn that has affected much of the chip industry.
“When I look at this market over the past 30 years, it’s always feast or famine,” Moorhead said. “We have an oversupply now. But guess what? Give it a couple of months and we will be in an undersupply and prices will go up.”
Even amid the downturn, Mehrotra is optimistic about the growth of Micron’s smartphone business. It supplies memory in phones from Apple, Motorola, Asus and more.
“The mix of smartphones is going more and more toward higher-end smartphones, toward the flagship smartphones, which require more memory as well,” Mehrotra said. “When we look ahead at 2024, we actually expect that year-over-year total worldwide smartphone unit sales will increase.”
Micron is also focused on rapid growth markets such as automotive and AI. The next generation of its most advanced product, High Bandwidth Memory, is set for volume production next year. HBM helps AI models such as ChatGPT remember past conversations and user preferences to generate more humanlike responses.
“It is able to pack 50% more memory capacity in a memory cube,” Mehrotra said. “It is able to give you 50% faster performance and is able to give you about 2.5 times better power and performance efficiency. And these are all the elements that are critically important in AI applications.”
Banned in China
Micron is facing one major specific challenge. In May, China’s cybersecurity administration banned some of its sales to key China infrastructure projects, saying it failed a security review. Last year, the U.S. barred chip companies from supplying China with certain key technologies.
“Micron is absolutely just a pawn in this game right now,” Moorhead said. “They weren’t the first and they were not the last.”
Mehrotra offers a more diplomatic approach.
“It’s very important for U.S. and China to provide an environment to the businesses so that they can invest in a predictable manner,” he said. “And what I can also tell you is that Micron, of course, is totally committed to bringing the value of its technology and products and manufacturing scale to the benefit of our customers across various end markets in China.”
“Micron is obviously trying to diversify its base,” Gartner’s Gupta said. “It has testing and packaging facilities in China. And obviously they are trying to move, diversify out of China.”
China can still rely on chips from Samsung, SK Hynix and smaller Chinese memory makers. That’s because memory is considered a commodity, meaning it’s relatively easy to switch between products from different companies. But that’s not guaranteed to last.
“When we get back to the boom days and Hynix and Samsung can’t fulfill all the volumes, you might see China diving back into Micron and suddenly lifting any restrictions,” Moorhead said.
Moorhead added that China’s cybersecurity risk accusation about Micron is “a front.”
“Compared to a CPU or a GPU system, it’s pretty hard to embed something nefarious into something like storage or memory,” he said. “That would be technology that I have never heard of.”
“We think China was being very nasty about this to Micron,” Schumer told CNBC ahead of the visit. “China’s upset with the Biden administration’s very smart prohibition of selling certain types of chip manufacturing equipment to China. But we’re going to stick up for Micron.”
This also isn’t the first time Micron has been at the center of U.S.-China tensions. In 2018, the U.S. accused Chinese chip company Fujian Jinhua of stealing intellectual property from Micron, a claim the Chinese company denied.
With no slowdown in geopolitical tension, Micron is instead focusing on U.S. expansion. Water and power were both significant reasons Micron settled on New York for its biggest project.
A rendering of Micron’s planned four memory chip fabs it will build north of Syracuse, New York, spending $100 billion over the next 20 years.
Micron
“Not just the Finger Lakes, but two Great Lakes: Lake Erie and Lake Ontario,” Hochul said. “There’s plentiful water and low-cost power generated primarily by hydroelectric and wind and solar. So we’re ready for it. We know it’s going to be a transition, but that’s what we want to do.”
Micron said each of its new fabs will use the equivalent of 25 Olympic-size swimming pools worth of water each day, with a goal of reusing or recycling 75% of that. Micron will also use the same amount of energy required to power some 25,000 homes.
“The energy costs are, interestingly enough, lower in the United States than most parts of the world,” Moorhead said. “People are more expensive in the United States, and so is the materials and the cost to build that factory. But that gap is narrowing over time.”
“That won’t happen in New York because we already have a legacy,” Hochul said. “We have Wolfspeed, we have GlobalFoundries. So this is not a new industry to us.”
Micron runs a Chip Camp in Boise for middle schoolers, which Gatzemeier’s daughter attended over the summer, and is investing in university programs to feed the pipeline for future semiconductor engineers.
“We’re actively starting our hiring ramp now,” Gatzemeier said. “We’ve started aggressively targeting all the universities. We’re also really going to draw on the global resources that Micron has across the world and bring in some of that semiconductor expertise to help train these new team members.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks during an unveiling event in New York on Feb. 26, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon shareholders rejected a proposal to adopt a policy that would require the company’s CEO and board chair roles to remain separate.
Vote totals disclosed in a filing Thursday show about 82% of shareholders rejected the proposal. The independent proposal was submitted alongside seven others at Amazon’s annual meeting on Wednesday. Each of the independent proposals were rejected.
Amazon split the roles of CEO and board chair when founder Jeff Bezos turned the helm over to Andy Jassy in 2021. As part of the transition, Bezos retained the title of executive chairman.
The proposal sought to codify that structure within Amazon “like the majority of S&P 500 companies,” advocacy group the Accountability Board wrote in its submission. The group argued that the split structure allows the board to focus on corporate governance and oversight, while the CEO focuses on the company’s business.
“With the positions currently separated, now would be an opportune time to do so,” the proxy states.
Shareholder proposals seeking the separation of board chair and CEO roles have been on the rise in recent years. The number of such proposals increased 113% among Russell 3000 companies in the first half of 2023, the highest level in the past decade, according to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.
Amazon urged shareholders to vote against the proposal, saying the current policy enables the board to determine the right leadership for the company “in light of our specific circumstances at any given time.”
The separation in 2021 came “after careful consideration” of Amazon’s leadership structure and functions, the company wrote in its recommendation.
“In light of our success through these various leadership structures, the board believes that shareholders are better served by the board retaining the ability to adapt to our evolving needs and implement the optimal leadership structure at any given time,” Amazon wrote in the filing.
Security officers block entrance doors after pro-Palestinian protesters attempted to enter the Microsoft Build conference at the Seattle Convention Center Arch building in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.
Jason Redmond | Afp | Getty Images
Microsoft employees are concerned that the company has been blocking Outlook emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” “genocide,” “apartheid” and “IOF off Azure,” even if they’re including those terms in an HR complaint, according to screenshots, recordings and documents viewed by CNBC.
Employees said they started noticing the change Wednesday just before noon PST, batch-testing emails with the terms in question and emails without them. Only the ones without such terms appeared in their outboxes, suggesting those containing the terms weren’t received, according to materials viewed by CNBC and three sources familiar with the matter.
The people asked not to be named in order to speak freely.
One employee with the word “apartheid” in their email signature, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said they sent a typical work-related email around 11:30 a.m. PST on Wednesday successfully. The person said that just before noon on the same day, their emails wouldn’t go through — ostensibly due to their email signature.
On internal message boards, messages seen by CNBC showed employees asking why their emails with the word “Israel” may go through but not the word “Palestine,” as well as “Gaza” and other terms. Modifications like “P4lestine” did go through, according to their tests.
One employee asked on an internal message board, “Is the company abandoning the inclusivity initiative or is this only targeting Palestinians and their allies?”
The Verge was first to report on the potential email block.
In a message seen by CNBC, Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s chief communications officer, responded to an employee post, writing: “To clarify, emails are not being blocked or censored, unless they are being sent to large numbers of random distribution groups. There can be a small delay and the team is working to make that as short as possible.”
“Over the past couple of days, a number of emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement.
But employees told CNBC that even when they attempted to send relatively mundane, solely work-related emails to small groups of colleagues, the emails still didn’t go through if they contained those terms.
Another employee who spoke on condition of anonymity said that when they attempted to send a report to HR containing one of the terms in question, they did not receive the auto-response typically confirming receipt until more than 24 hours later. The message also didn’t show up in the online HR portal until more than 24 hours later.
Some emails were delivered after being delayed by seven hours or more, according to the group No Azure for Apartheid. The group suggested manual reviews of such emails were taking place before they were delivered.
Microsoft protests
Microsoft has seen a growing number of protests at recent events over the Israeli military’s use of the company’s AI products. Protesters have also sent emails to the company’s executives outlining their concerns.
At Microsoft’s Build developer conference in Seattle this week, protesters interrupted executives during keynote speeches and sessions.
On Tuesday, protesters interrupted the Microsoft Build session on best AI security practices, singling out Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s head of responsible AI, who was co-hosting the session with Microsoft AI security chief Neta Haiby.
Haiby was formerly a member of the Israel Defense Forces, according to a Tumblr page viewed by CNBC.
“Sarah Bird, you are whitewashing the crimes of Microsoft in Palestine,” Hossam Nasr, an organizer with the group No Azure for Apartheid, said.
Nasr was one of the Microsoft employees terminated last year after planning a vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza.
Earlier on Tuesday during another Microsoft Build session, an unnamed Palestinian tech worker disrupted a speech by Jay Parikh, Microsoft’s head of CoreAI.
“Jay, you are complicit in the genocide in Gaza,” the tech worker, who did not wish to share their name for fear of retaliation, said. “My people are suffering because of you. How dare you. How dare you talk about AI when my people are suffering. Cut ties with Israel.”
The worker then called to “free Palestine” and said, “No Azure for apartheid,” a nod to the group and its petition.
A demonstrator is removed from the audience as they interrupt a presentation by Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella at the Microsoft Build 2025 conference in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
On Monday, Microsoft software engineer Joe Lopez interrupted CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote speech onstage, saying, “Satya, how about you show them how Microsoft is killing Palestinians? How about you show them how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?”
Lopez was later fired, according to a document viewed by CNBC that stated the reason as, “misconduct resulting in the violation of both company policy and our expectations of a respectful workplace.”
The document said Lopez would be ineligible to return to Microsoft as an employee, contractor, or in any other capacity, including an employee of a Microsoft partner, customer or other third party.
At Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event last month, two Microsoft software engineers publicly protested the use of the company’s AI by the Israeli military during executive presentations. The roles of both employees, Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal, were terminated soon after, according to documents viewed by CNBC.
OpenAI is betting a new “era” of computing will justify the company’s decision to spend billions of dollars on bespoke hardware to go with it, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said.
The artificial intelligence startup, best known for the ChatGPT chatbot, announced plans on Wednesday to buy iPhone designer Jony Ive’s devices startup io for about $6.4 billion. Ive’s company was founded roughly a year ago and doesn’t have a product on the market.
Friar told CNBC on Thursday that any startup as young as io was “hard to value.” But she sees an eventual return on that investment.
“You’re really betting on great people and beyond,” Friar said. “It’s not just about imagining what a new platform could look like — you’ve got to be able to craft it. You’ve got to be able to build it. You’ve got to be able to understand supply chains.”
Friar, who took the CFO job at OpenAI last summer and was formerly CEO of Nextdoor, said new devices will eventually get OpenAI’s technology in the hands of more users, and drive subscription growth and attach rates. ChatGPT last reported 500 million weekly active users, but monthly actives are higher, Friar said.
“When you start thinking about it beyond just a phone, it starts to grab the imagination,” she said. “If we can get people around the world excited to use AI, we have many ways to begin to think of a business model around that. So it could be an ongoing, bigger subscription for ChatGPT.”
Friar’s comments echo others in the tech industry who have said AI hardware could change the face of computing, and threaten the iPhone. Eddy Cue, Apple’s chief of services, said earlier this month that he believes AI devices could replace the iPhone within ten years.
While OpenAI works with Apple on an iPhone and Siri integration, Friar said the company still saw a need to have its own proprietary devices.
“We want to work with many partners. When we single-thread ourselves, we don’t think that drives max innovation,” Friar said. “We continue to work closely with Apple on their device, and we’d love to see more being done with AI — but we also want to keep sparking innovation broadly in the ecosystem.”
Friar hinted at new devices without touchscreens. She declined to give details around what exactly they might look like, pointing to the former Apple team’s secretive culture and “mystique” around products.
“As you birth this new era of AI, there’s going to be new platforms and new substrate,” she said. “We think of tech today as a little bit more around touch. We as humans, we see things, we hear things, we talk. And our models are great at that.”
