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Micron's top brass wins the memory crisis corpo double speak award: 'We do not have line of sight as to when that supply vector will intersect the demand vector'
A lot of words for "don't expect things to get better soon."
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A slight bastion of hope for those affected by the memory crisis (ie, anyone who wants to buy new electronics in the next few years) is the planned arrival of new fabrication facilities, pumping out vast amounts of wafers that will be turned into memory modules. According to Micron, though, we shouldn't hold our breath.
Sumit Sadana, the executive vice president and chief business officer of Micron, spoke at a tech and finance forum earlier this week. According to Sadana:
"All of this growth in [AI server-critical] HBM pressures the supply that is left for everything else, which means that the wafer supply has to increase dramatically, and that is just not easy to do."
"It takes a long time because the whole industry got itself into a state where most of that expansion needed to be done in greenfield expansion," Sadana continued. "Which means you go to an empty space that is nothing but trees, and you have to create an entire massive fab cluster there. That is a very challenging endeavour.
"It is one of the most complex engineering projects in the world from a construction perspective to build such fabs."
Certainly, anyone who envisions a new wafer facility being thrown together in a few months will need to take a hefty dose of reality pills, at least from Micron's perspective. Sadana points out that fabs are not like data centers, which seem to have been sprouting from the ground like weeds in recent months.
"Building a data center—no offense to our customers—is considerably easier than building a sophisticated leading-edge technology front-end fab," Sadana continues.
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