Data centre buyers guzzled up memory hardware over the past quarter, with US chipmaker Micron reporting record $8.71 billion Q1 revenues.
The company now expects “high-capacity NAND SSDs to start displacing capacity HDDs in the data center” over the next two years, it added.
That's "a phenomenon that is 2027 and beyond" CEO Sanjay Mehrotra clarified on a fiscal Q1, 2025 earnings call late Wednesday.
The high-bandwidth memory (HBM) market meanwhile will quadruple from $16 billion in 2024 to over $100 billion by 2030, execs predicted.
That’s on the back of a colossal overhaul of data centres globally to support AI inference workloads that are highly memory-intensive.
"We expect overall capex spending in fiscal 2025 to be approximately $14 billion... The overwhelming majority of the fiscal 2025 capex is to support HBM", a Micron investor relations presentation showed.
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Micron’s HBM3E 8-high [pdf] hardware is designed into NVIDIA's latest Blackwell B200 and GB200 platforms, executives confirmed on a call.
Its upcoming HBM4E meanwhile will “introduce a paradigm shift… by incorporating an option to customize the logic base die for certain customers using an advanced logic foundry manufacturing process from TSMC.”
Data center buyers represented over 50% of Idaho-based Micron’s revenues for the first time – and just one of those buyers snapped up some $1.1 billion of its memory products, said CEO Sanjay Mehrotra.
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The earnings call came weeks after the US Department of Commerce agreed to grant Micron $6.1 billion under the CHIPS Act to support the buildout of advanced DRAM manufacturing fabs in Idaho and New York.
CEO Mehrotra said on a December 18 call: “We continue to ramp our 1-beta technology node, which supports HBM3E, and we are preparing to ramp our 1-gamma technology node using EUV in calendar 2025…”
Micron noted slow automotive unit, mobile, and PC memory sales however. Executives also flagged “a temporary moderation in near-term data center SSD purchases by customers after several quarters of very rapid growth” as they posted upcoming Q2 2025 earnings and revenue guidance below existing consensus, sending shares sharply down.
Operating expenses in fiscal Q1 were $1.05 billion, down $34 million sequentially and benefiting from lower labor-related costs and ongoing tight expense control said CFO Mark Murphy. CapEx was $3.1 billion, resulting in free cash flow of $112 million in the quarter.
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