Micron Technology

Micron Technology was founded in October 1978 by four engineers 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 initial capital was $300,000, raised partly from local Idaho investors who knew nothing about semiconductors but trusted the founders.

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 sold out months in advance. Nvidia's H100 and H200 GPUs — the most sought-after chips in the world — required HBM from Micron, Samsung, or SK Hynix. The dental office startup from Idaho had become an essential component of the AI infrastructure driving the global economy.

Micron reported fiscal Q4 2025 revenue of $11.32 billion — up 46% year-on-year — with gross margins expanding to 45.7%. For full fiscal year 2025, data center revenue accounted for 56% of total revenue, with HBM alone reaching nearly $2 billion in a single quarter. Micron had locked in price and volume agreements for its entire 2026 HBM supply. The company entered fiscal 2026 with $18 billion in capex budgeted to expand capacity. HBM market size was forecast to grow from $35 billion in 2025 to $100 billion in 2028 — a milestone larger than the entire DRAM market of 2024. The four engineers who had started in a dental office in potato-farming Idaho had built one of the most strategically critical semiconductor companies in the world.