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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.”

Meanwhile, Micron has started construction on a $2.75 billion assembly and test facility in India.

“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.”

Schumer led a delegation of senators to visit China in October for a rare meeting with President Xi Jinping, in part to discuss the ban on Micron.

“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.”

In Arizona, the world’s advanced chip leader, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, recently blamed a shortage of skilled labor for delays to its massive $40 billion fab under construction.

“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.”

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Etsy touts ‘shopping domestically’ as Trump tariffs threaten price increases for imports

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April 17, 2025

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Etsy touts 'shopping domestically' as Trump tariffs threaten price increases for imports

An employee walks past a quilt displaying Etsy Inc. signage at the company’s headquarters in the Brooklyn.

Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Etsy is trying to make it easier for shoppers to purchase products from local merchants and avoid the extra cost of imports as President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs raise concerns about soaring prices.

In a post to Etsy’s website on Thursday, CEO Josh Silverman said the company is “surfacing new ways for buyers to discover businesses in their countries” via shopping pages and by featuring local sellers on its website and app.

“While we continue to nurture and enable cross-border trade on Etsy, we understand that people are increasingly interested in shopping domestically,” Silverman said.

Etsy operates an online marketplace that connects buyers and sellers with mostly artisanal and handcrafted goods. The site, which had 5.6 million active sellers as of the end of December, competes with e-commerce juggernaut Amazon, as well as newer entrants that have ties to China like Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop.

By highlighting local sellers, Etsy could relieve some shoppers from having to pay higher prices induced by President Trump’s widespread tariffs on trade partners. Trump has imposed tariffs on most foreign countries, with China facing a rate of 145%, and other nations facing 10% rates after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations. Trump also signed an executive order that will end the de minimis provision, a loophole for low-value shipments often used by online businesses, on May 2.

Temu and Shein have already announced they plan to raise prices late next week in response to the tariffs. Sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, many of whom source their products from China, have said they’re considering raising prices.

Silverman said Etsy has provided guidance for its sellers to help them “run their businesses with as little disruption as possible” in the wake of tariffs and changes to the de minimis exemption.

Before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs took effect, Silverman said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in late February that he expects Etsy to benefit from the tariffs and de minimis restrictions because it “has much less dependence on products coming in from China.”

“We’re doing whatever work we can do to anticipate and prepare for come what may,” Silverman said at the time. “In general, though, I think Etsy will be more resilient than many of our competitors in these situations.”

Still, American shoppers may face higher prices on Etsy as U.S. businesses that source their products or components from China pass some of those costs on to consumers.

Etsy shares are down 17% this year, slightly more than the Nasdaq.

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Google hit with second antitrust blow, adding to concerns about future of ads business

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April 17, 2025

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Google hit with second antitrust blow, adding to concerns about future of ads business

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 11, 2018 in Washington, DC.

Alex Wong | Getty Images

Google’s antitrust woes are continuing to mount, just as the company tries to brace for a future dominated by artificial intelligence.

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Google held illegal monopolies in online advertising markets due to its position between ad buyers and sellers.

The ruling, which followed a September trial in Alexandria, Virginia, represents a second major antitrust blow for Google in under a year. In August, a judge determined the company has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. 

Google is in a particularly precarious spot as it tries to simultaneously defend its primary business in court while fending off an onslaught of new competition due to the emergence of generative AI, most notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which offers users alternative ways to search for information. Revenue growth has cooled in recent years, and Google also now faces the added potential of a slowdown in ad spending due to economic concerns from President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs.

Parent company Alphabet reports first-quarter results next week. Alphabet’s stock price dipped more than 1% on Thursday and is now down 20% this year.

Why Google's antitrust woes endangers its AI momentum

In Thursday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said Google’s anticompetitive practices “substantially harmed” publishers and users on the web. The trial featured 39 live witnesses, depositions from an additional 20 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits.

Judge Brinkema ruled that Google unlawfully controls two of the three parts of the advertising technology market: the publisher ad server market and ad exchange market. Brinkema dismissed the third part of the case, determining that tools used for general display advertising can’t clearly be defined as Google’s own market. In particular, the judge cited the purchases of DoubleClick and Admeld and said the government failed to show those “acquisitions were anticompetitive.”

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president or regulatory affairs, said in an emailed statement. “We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a press release from the DOJ that the ruling represents a “landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square.”

Potential ad disruption

If regulators force the company to divest parts of the ad-tech business, as the Justice Department has requested, it could open up opportunities for smaller players and other competitors to fill the void and snap up valuable market share. Amazon has been growing its ad business in recent years.

Meanwhile, Google is still defending itself against claims that its search has acted as a monopoly by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance. Google said in August, immediately after the search case ruling, that it would appeal, meaning the matter can play out in court for years even after the remedies are determined.

The remedies trial, which will lay out the consequences, begins next week. The Justice Department is aiming for a break up of Google’s Chrome browser and eliminating exclusive agreements, like its deal with Apple for search on iPhones. The judge is expected to make the ruling by August.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai (L) and Apple CEO Tim Cook (R) listen as U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a roundtable with American and Indian business leaders in the East Room of the White House on June 23, 2023 in Washington, DC.

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

After the ad market ruling on Thursday, Gartner’s Andrew Frank said Google’s “conflicts of interest” are apparent by how the market runs.

“The structure has been decades in the making,” Frank said, adding that “untangling that would be a significant challenge, particularly since lawyers don’t tend to be system architects.”

However, the uncertainty that comes with a potentially years-long appeals process means many publishers and advertisers will be waiting to see how things shake out before making any big decisions given how much they rely on Google’s technology.

“Google will have incentives to encourage more competition possibly by loosening certain restrictions on certain media it controls, YouTube being one of them,” Frank said. “Those kind of incentives may create opportunities for other publishers or ad tech players.”

A date for the remedies trial hasn’t been set.

Damian Rollison, senior director of market insights for marketing platform Soci, said the revenue hit from the ad market case could be more dramatic than the impact from the search case.

“The company stands to lose a lot more in material terms if its ad business, long its main source of revenue, is broken up,” Rollison said in an email. “Whereas divisions like Chrome are more strategically important.”

WATCH: U.S. judge finds Google holds illegal online ad-tech monopolies

U.S. judge finds Google holds illegal online ad tech monopolies

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Discord sued by New Jersey over child safety features

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April 17, 2025

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Discord sued by New Jersey over child safety features

Jason Citron, CEO of Discord in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2024.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images

The New Jersey attorney general sued Discord on Thursday, alleging that the company misled consumers about child safety features on the gaming-centric social messaging app.

The lawsuit, filed in the New Jersey Superior Court by Attorney General Matthew Platkin and the state’s division of consumer affairs, alleges that Discord violated the state’s consumer fraud laws.

Discord did so, the complaint said, by allegedly “misleading children and parents from New Jersey” about safety features, “obscuring” the risks children face on the platform and failing to enforce its minimum age requirement.

“Discord’s strategy of employing difficult to navigate and ambiguous safety settings to lull parents and children into a false sense of safety, when Discord knew well that children on the Application were being targeted and exploited, are unconscionable and/or abusive commercial acts or practices,” lawyers wrote in the legal filing.

They alleged that Discord’s acts and practices were “offensive to public policy.”

A Discord spokesperson said in a statement that the company disputes the allegations and that it is “proud of our continuous efforts and investments in features and tools that help make Discord safer.”

“Given our engagement with the Attorney General’s office, we are surprised by the announcement that New Jersey has filed an action against Discord today,” the spokesperson said.

One of the lawsuit’s allegations centers around Discord’s age-verification process, which the plaintiffs believe is flawed, writing that children under thirteen can easily lie about their age to bypass the app’s minimum age requirement.

The lawsuit also alleges that Discord misled parents to believe that its so-called Safe Direct Messaging feature “was designed to automatically scan and delete all private messages containing explicit media content.” The lawyers claim that Discord misrepresented the efficacy of that safety tool.

“By default, direct messages between ‘friends’ were not scanned at all,” the complaint stated. “But even when Safe Direct Messaging filters were enabled, children were still exposed to child sexual abuse material, videos depicting violence or terror, and other harmful content.”

The New Jersey attorney general is seeking unspecified civil penalties against Discord, according to the complaint.

The filing marks the latest lawsuit brought by various state attorneys general around the country against social media companies.

In 2023, a bipartisan coalition of over 40 state attorneys general sued Meta over allegations that the company knowingly implemented addictive features across apps like Facebook and Instagram that harm the mental well being of children and young adults.

The New Mexico attorney general sued Snap in Sep. 2024 over allegations that Snapchat’s design features have made it easy for predators to easily target children through sextortion schemes.

The following month, a bipartisan group of over a dozen state attorneys general filed lawsuits against TikTok over allegations that the app misleads consumers that its safe for children. In one particular lawsuit filed by the District of Columbia’s attorney general, lawyers allege that the ByteDance-owned app maintains a virtual currency that “substantially harms children” and a  livestreaming feature that “exploits them financially.”

In January 2024, executives from Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X were grilled by lawmakers during a senate hearing over allegations that the companies failed to protect children on their respective social media platforms.

WATCH: The FTC has an uphill battle in its antitrust case against Meta.

The FTC has an uphill battle in its antitrust case against Meta: Former Facebook general counsel

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