Micron Technology, Inc.

Micron Technology was founded in October 1978 by four engineers — Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson, and Doug Pitman — in a converted dental office in Boise, Idaho. Boise was not Silicon Valley. Idaho was known for potatoes, not semiconductors. The founders had previously worked at Mostek, a Texas semiconductor company, and believed they could design memory chips more efficiently than their former employer. Their first office had no windows. Their initial capital was $300,000, raised partly from local Idaho investors who knew nothing about semiconductors but trusted the founders.

Micron's first product was a 64-kilobit DRAM memory chip, completed in 1980. The chip was smaller and used less power than competing designs from much larger companies including Texas Instruments, Motorola, and Japanese manufacturers. Micron's first major customer was Mostek — its founders' former employer. The company that had been started in a dental office was supplying chips to an established semiconductor manufacturer within two years of founding.

Japanese semiconductor manufacturers — backed by government subsidies — flooded the U.S. market with DRAM chips priced below cost in the mid-1980s, driving American competitors out of business. Intel, Motorola, and dozens of other U.S. companies exited DRAM production. Micron nearly failed. The company was rescued by J.R. Simplot — an Idaho potato farmer who had become a billionaire supplying McDonald's with french fries — who invested $5 million at the critical moment. The U.S. government subsequently imposed tariffs on Japanese chips. Micron survived as the only major U.S. DRAM manufacturer.

Micron acquired Elpida Memory — Japan's last major DRAM manufacturer, which had filed for bankruptcy — in 2013 for $2.5 billion. The acquisition made Micron one of only three significant DRAM manufacturers in the world, alongside Samsung and SK Hynix. The consolidation of the memory chip industry into three players transformed economics that had been chronically unprofitable due to overcapacity into a more stable oligopoly. Micron's revenues and margins improved dramatically as pricing became more rational.

The explosion of artificial intelligence applications in 2023 created extraordinary demand for high-bandwidth memory — chips that could feed data to AI processors fast enough to keep them occupied. Micron's HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) products, designed for AI accelerators, sold out months in advance. Nvidia's H100 and H200 GPUs — the most sought-after chips in the world — used Micron, Samsung, or SK Hynix memory. The dental office startup from Idaho had become an essential component of the AI revolution, with revenues exceeding $25 billion annually.