Micron Technology is in the headlines again, this time for a new investment worth $3 billion. This makes the company one of the three major producers of DRAM memory and one of the six producers of NAND flash memory – as well as the only US-based company that makes DRAM.
However, what’s really interesting is that Micron Technologies recently announced that it would be heavily investing in its US operations based in Manassas, Virginia, which is about 45 miles west of Washington DC, the US capital.
This investment once again confirms that Micron is serious about stable profits in the coming years – and has a lot of plans about autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things (IoT) as the technology connecting them.
The official announcement by Micron investing roughly $3 billion in its Virginia operations by 2030 was well-accepted by the public. Even though the project would take 12 years to be fully initiated, the annual investments will be $250 million each. Micron also plans to spend $8 billion on capital expenditures in the current fiscal year, which is a lot more compared to the $250 million as annual investment for the development of autonomous vehicles.
Micron Technologies will also expand the clean room space. The current plans are to hire around 1,100 employees in the area, and the company will establish the Manassas, Virginia site as the Center for Excellence during its long-life cycle memory projects that would include a research and development (R&D) center that will complement the other facilities spread around the world – in Idaho, Japan, China, Singapore and Italy.
In a recent press release, the CEO of Micron Technologies, Sanjay Mehrotra stated:
“Micron’s Manassas site manufactures our long-lifecycle products that are built using our mature process technologies, and primarily sold into the automotive, networking and industrial market.”
Micron’s embedded solutions will skyrocket. Over the last quarter alone, this sector made up 11.5% of Micron’s revenue quarter. Still, if the industry projections and predictions turn true, these applications could grow much faster in the future compared to the broader memory market.
Even though the DRAM and NAND solutions developed by Micron have been associated with the PC, mobile phone and server markets, the growth is mostly triggered by the electronic content present in automobiles and factories – which is also expected to grow by 140% between until 2021. The Internet of Things (IoT) market, on the other hand, will grow more than 70%.
Micron is also jumping on autonomous cars. As the third largest producer of DRAM around the globe, it has the largest market share of the automotive segment. The company’s plans right now are to improve the development of vehicles and start producing “data centers on wheels” as they described them.