Micron’s New Factory in Xi’an Has Started Construction, Investment in China Exceeds 11 Billion Yuan
On March 27th, Micron‘s Xi’an factory held a groundbreaking ceremony for the new plant, which is part of its additional 4.3 billion yuan investment plan announced in June last year.
Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of Micron, stated in his speech that China is an important market for Micron’s global business. Since 2005, Micron has invested over 11 billion yuan in the Chinese market.
This week, the CEO also appeared at the China Development Forum and publicly stated on multiple occasions that Micron will firmly commit to long-term development in China and invest in the Chinese market.
According to its introduction, Micron’s additional investment plan of 4.3 billion yuan in the Xi’an factory includes acquiring assets from Powerchip Semiconductor’s Xi’an branch and constructing a new factory building to mainly produce mobile DRAM for smartphones, as well as NAND and SSD. The new factory is expected to start production in the second half of 2025 and gradually increase production according to market demand. After completion, the total area of Micron’s Xi’an factory will exceed 132,000 square meters.
Currently, Micron has about 44,000 employees worldwide, with over 4,000 in China. The company has established sales business units in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai, with a research and design center specially set up in Shanghai. Xi’an is its production center in China, mainly responsible for the packaging testing of DRAM memory chips and module manufacturing.
Manish Bhatia, Executive Vice President of Global Operations at Micron, stated that after the expansion of the Xi’an factory, the number of employees in Micron’s China team will reach 4800.
Driven by the AI boom, this company is emerging from a year-long storage market downturn.
Last week, Micron announced its financial report for the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, with revenue reaching $5.82 billion, a significant increase of 57.7% compared to the same period last year; net profit was approximately $793 million, while in the previous quarter there was a net loss of $1.234 billion and in the same period of fiscal year 2023 there was a net loss as high as $2.312 billion.
Currently, advanced HBM storage products collectively laid out by major storage manufacturers including Micron are facing market shortages due to high demand.
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This solution, which uses 3D stacking technology to integrate multiple DRAM memory chips into one unit, produces memory products with not only high bandwidth and low power consumption but also high density and small footprint. It can store more data and transfer data faster. When combined with NVIDIA’s most advanced GPU, it is suitable for large-scale data processing and fast data exchange in AI scenarios.
SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron are all important participants in this field. The latest generation of HBM products from these three companies have entered the supply chain list for NVIDIA’s newly launched B200 GPU. Micron and SK Hynix both revealed in recent financial report meetings that their HBM products have been sold out this year, with the majority of next year’s production capacity already booked.
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra also made a prediction, stating that the demand for AI servers is driving rapid growth in HBM, DDR5, and data center SSDs. The market will emerge from the severe imbalance of oversupply last year, with DRAM and NAND industry supply expected to be lower than demand by 2024.
A series of favorable factors have also driven Micron’s stock price to hit a new high, rising for eight consecutive trading days with the highest single-day increase exceeding 10%. As of the close of the US stock market, the company’s stock price was $118.8, with a market value reaching $131.6 billion.
