U.S.’s biggest memory-chip maker, Boise’s Micron, booms as never before in AI rush

Micron has come a long way since its humble founding nearly half a century ago in the basement of a Boise dental office, where sedative gas wafted through the floorboards and an early executive used a hair dryer to keep the company’s logo from smearing off its chips.

The company’s high-bandwidth memory chips, a type of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, are sold out for the rest of the year. The shortage has sent Micron’s stock price soaring as the company keeps breaking its own records for sales and profits.

“Micron is in the best competitive position in its history,” CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in the company’s latest conference call with analysts.

Micron is the biggest U.S.-based maker of memory chips, an essential component in everything from smartphones, computers and cars to washing machines, ultrasounds and data centers. The company has survived in an industry rife with downturns.

Now it’s in the midst of an unprecedented expansion, racing to build the manufacturing capacity needed to meet demand spurred by the rise in artificial intelligence, even halting consumer sales to focus on AI-driven growth.

U.S.’s No. 1 memory-chip maker ramps up manufacturing

Large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT rely on high-bandwidth memory, also called HBM. It is faster and more advanced than conventional DRAM (pronounced dee-ram) for both training and inference, where an AI model generates an answer in response to a prompt.

Micron plans to spend about $200 billion on its domestic expansion, which includes constructing two chip-making factories at its headquarters campus in Southeast Boise, building up to four fabs in New York state, and modernizing its existing fab in Virginia. (Fab is semiconductor-industry shorthand for a fabrication plant.) Then, the company says it could meet market demand and achieve its goal of producing 40% of its DRAM in the U.S.

Micron says the manufacturing complex it plans in Clay, New York, would mark the state’s largest private investment. It broke ground on the project in January. The company says it would be the largest semiconductor factory ever built in America.

Micron’s first fab in Boise is also Idaho’s largest-ever private investment, the company says. The two Idaho fabs are slated to cost $25 billion apiece over the next two decades, according to a spokesperson.

Micron is also expanding abroad. In November, the company announced plans for a $9.6 billion fab in Japan. In January, the company began building a $24 billion fab in Singapore for flash memory. And on Feb. 28, it opened a $2.75 billion assembly and test fab in India.

Back home in Idaho, the company says it already has achieved key construction milestones on its first fab, allowing it to unlock at least some of the more than $6.1 billion it was promised by the Biden administration under the 2022 CHIPS Act subsidizing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. The white, rectangular building, now several stories tall and covering about 10 football fields, is taking shape off South Federal Way. Micron says it will be the first new memory manufacturing fab built in the country in over two decades.

Output at the fab, which is visible to passersby on Interstate 84 heading into Boise, is expected to begin in 2027, though a banner hanging from the partially constructed building says “Coming 2026.” Either way, it can’t come online fast enough.

Memory-chip prices have surged as demand outpaces supply, resulting in a gold rush for the semiconductor industry.

Micron, coming off a string of quarterly sales records, reported all-time high revenue of $13.6 billion for its most recent quarter, up from $11.3 billion the prior quarter, and is expected to announce revenue of around $18.78 billion in its next earnings release March 18.

The company’s stock price has seen explosive growth, rising by over 300% in just the past year to a historic high of $437.80 in early February. That’s the highest return of all major semiconductor makers, according to TradingPedia, a financial-analysis platform.

Micron declined a request for an interview with an executive, citing the quiet period required by federal securities regulators over several weeks preceding an earnings release.

New fabs, business partners help Micron reshape Boise

Micron’s palatial campus in southern Idaho is driving a subtler transformation, drawing housing, commercial real estate and businesses into its orbit — shifting the center of gravity in the Treasure Valley toward the compound in the process.

The expansion extends to multinational companies, too. Exyte, the German clean-room builder hired (and later dropped) as the general contractor for Micron’s first Boise fab, opened a Boise office that it said was a direct result of winning the construction bid. The company said it would add about 100 high-paying engineering jobs and other opportunities to the area.

The latest to grow its footprint is Lam Research, a major Micron supplier that on Feb. 17 cut the ribbon at a new office east of downtown Boise, less than 5 miles from Micron’s growing headquarters.

For the Fremont, California-based company, proximity to Micron’s new chip-making hub is the draw. Lam’s 9,600-square-foot space in a Parkcenter Boulevard office building will allow it to staff up its Idaho operation, which for some 30 years had been housed in a smaller building by the airport. Now, the company plans to place 150 engineers at the office “with room to grow,” spokesperson Laura Bakken said.

“Our presence here really is to support Micron,” she told the Idaho Statesman in an interview. “No one has a crystal ball, but as a leading supplier we expect to grow with them.”

Chip-related Boise development growth unlikely to slow

Lam Research is a massive firm in its own right. It makes the machines that companies like Micron use to make semiconductors, depositing and removing material at an atomic level to create the intricate architecture of each silicon wafer.

Its ties to Micron are tight: In 2025, Lam was one of 14 suppliers to receive an award from Micron for its outstanding performance in front-end capital equipment, according to a news release.

Over the next five years, the company forecasts demand for $200 billion in wafer fabrication equipment — exactly where Lam specializes. Investors seem keen on that outlook. A year ago, Lam’s stock traded around $80 per share. On March 9, it hovered around $210, down from its all-time high in February of nearly $250.

Lam’s relocation is a downstream effect not only of Micron’s massive investment, but also of the public money that helped facilitate it. U.S. Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho underscored that point on Feb. 17, standing by as Lam cut the ribbon on its new engineering office.

Risch said Micron is the poster child of the CHIPS Act, which he and the rest of Idaho’s congressional delegation voted against because it included spending for other ventures. At a groundbreaking ceremony in September 2022 for Micron’s first Boise fab, Risch said he and his colleagues, including Sen. Mike Crapo and Reps. Russ Fulcher and Mike Simpson, “painfully voted no,” knowing the legislation would likely still pass, and if it didn’t, they could pass a standalone bill with the $52 billion allocated to bolster the semiconductor industry. Former President Joe Biden signed the bill into law in August 2022.

Risch said the measure “is doing exactly what we wanted it to do” — shoring up national security while bolstering the economy. “The semiconductor industry is really the backbone of the modern world,” he said.

Micron has bet big on that vision. But so has Boise, which is anticipating Micron’s investment to indirectly cultivate 15,000 new jobs supporting Micron and its projected 2,000 additional on-site employees, according to Boise Valley Economic Partnership. Lam’s 150 engineers represent just 1% of that boom.

Micron itself has about 54,000 employees worldwide, with over 5,000 of those in Idaho.

Micron ‘a magnet … for creative, ambitious minds’

Micron has been an incubator for the local technology sector, according to Ross Burkhart, a political science professor at Boise State University.

“I think it’s a magnet for Boise,” Burkhart told the Statesman. “Just look at the expansion downtown. Some of that is Micron-based directly, but a lot of it is indirect. Micron is an attractor for creative and ambitious minds to come to Boise.”

But when Micron’s founders moved their fledgling company into that dentist’s office basement in 1978, Boise was hardly a tech hub. The company’s first plant on Federal Way was designed on the cheap using a supermarket floor plan, outfitted with second‑hand equipment other chipmakers no longer wanted. Against all odds, it became a behemoth.

Backed by potato magnate J.R. Simplot and a small circle of Boise investors, Micron endured the notorious boom-and-bust cycles of the semiconductor industry, weathering layoffs and price wars and avoiding being captured by rivals. The company survived as domestic competitors left the memory business.

“Now when you think of Boise, you might not think of natural resources first,” Burkhart said. “You might think instead of the tech sector, the culture economy, the inward migration of people into this area with kind of this robust, professional outlook.”

In 2009, amid the Great Recession, Micron shut its last Boise production line. Its headquarters campus shifted toward research and development, and employment there shrank even as the company’s global workforce increased. That made the company’s move to bring memory manufacturing back to Boise — with the 2022 announcement of a $15 billion fab — a watershed moment for Micron and the state.

Since then, the scale of its ambitions has only grown.

“There’s a certain loyalty that comes with it,” Burkhart said. “I think we see that loyalty with Micron, where they were founded in the late ‘70s, and you’d think that, well, maybe they would leave Idaho behind. But that really hasn’t happened. They want to remain here.”

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