Micron Bets Big on AI to Boost Chip Sales with $100m Venture Fund

Nasdaq-traded Micron Technology (MU, non dividend paying, Beta of 2.27) is betting $100m that AI will ramp up demand for its memory chips. Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO, and former co-founder of SanDisk, spoke highly of the big opportunities ahead which will increasingly require better "memory and storage technologies" to galvanise the operation of neural networks at the heart of machine learning applications. Micron's premise is that machine learning workloads (training process) require six times more DRAM per server and double the SSD capacity than a standard cloud server. The memory bottleneck additionally requires investment in the much touted HBM or high bandwidth memory - Micron's offering in this space takes the shape of hybrid memory cubes (HMC). Samsung and Hynix ("Innovation from Within") are the current market leaders in HBM.