Author: Wang Jian
Produced by Lishi Business Review
Another trillion-dollar giant has been born. On the evening of May 26, Micron Technology's stock price surged, pushing its total market capitalization above $1 trillion.
Founded in 1978 in Boise, a small inland city in the US with no semiconductor industry foundation, Micron Technology now firmly holds a place among the top three global memory chip manufacturers, sharing the DRAM market with Samsung and SK Hynix. Amidst multiple industry cycles of reshuffling, the Japanese memory industry has nearly collapsed, and American competitors have largely exited the market. Only Micron has survived and remained standing, its path to survival shrouded in controversy and mystery.
Throughout its development, Micron lacked policy support and substantial capital backing, yet it repeatedly used political and legal means to navigate industry crises: early on, it filed complaints against Japanese companies for dumping and acted as a witness in antitrust cases to extricate itself from trouble; subsequently, it lobbied and intervened in industry competition for many years, earning it the label of "political opportunist." Political leverage was merely a means to buy it breathing room; its extreme cost control and decades of engineering expertise allowed it to produce smaller chips and higher wafer yields, enabling it to withstand industry price cycles.
However, strategic misjudgments have sown the seeds of future problems. The acquisition of Elpida missed the golden decade of HBM, leaving Micron significantly behind in the high-end AI market. Currently, Micron is facing triple pressure: a significant disparity in HBM market share, encroachment on the mid-to-low-end market by Chinese manufacturers, and a sharp drop in its core market share in China. While struggling to catch up and repay its technological time debt, it also faces a new round of industry competition. Whether this chip giant, which has established itself through unique strategies and hardcore manufacturing, can weather the economic cycle and maintain its industry position is a matter of great market attention. Enjoy:
Micron Technology is one of the world's three largest memory chip manufacturers, alongside Samsung and SK Hynix, and accounts for about 20% of the global DRAM market.
This was actually quite unexpected.
Micron Technology was founded in Boise, Idaho, in 1978—an inland town with no existing semiconductor industry. During its development, it lacked the government industrial policies that its competitors enjoyed, the massive capital backing it received, and even a sufficiently deep technological moat.
However, the global memory industry has experienced one cyclical collapse after another. While its former American competitors have been eliminated one after another, and even the Japanese memory industry has been almost completely wiped out, Micron Technology has managed to survive time and time again.
why is that?
The answer may lie in a less-than-respectable detail: at the three most dangerous junctures, Micron's first reaction was not to accelerate technological investment, but to pick up the phone and ask Washington for help.
This is not to say that Micron lacks real technological capabilities; its manufacturing cost control has long been one of the most competitive in the industry. However, its ultimate survival and longevity are underpinned by a survival logic that is rarely discussed openly. And the boundaries of this logic are being re-examined in this era.
01 Unintentionally "feeding" the opponent
In early 1985, Micron was the last DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) company still operating in the United States.
DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) can be considered the "scratch paper" of electronic devices, and also where the CPU temporarily stores data. Without it, no matter how powerful the CPU is, it cannot function. At that time, with the support of government industrial policies, Japan's six major electronics giants dumped their products at below-cost prices, squeezing their American counterparts out of the market one by one.
Micron's situation was simple: either find another way out or become the next one to be eliminated. However, Micron's choice was: pick up the phone and call Washington.
In June 1985, Micron formally complained to the U.S. Department of Commerce about Japanese companies dumping DRAM. As the only DRAM manufacturer in Japan, the U.S. naturally couldn't stand idly by and immediately put pressure on Japan. In 1986, the U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Agreement was signed, forcing Japanese companies to accept export price controls. Reports indicate that in the following years, Micron's DRAM sales increased tenfold.
But this victory had an unexpected consequence: while the agreement temporarily restrained Japan, it ceded market space to a player that no one took seriously at the time—South Korea's Samsung.
At the time, Samsung's DRAM technology was just beginning, and it was struggling to compete head-on with Japanese companies. Micron's dispute with Japanese manufacturers presented Samsung with a rare opportunity for development. Ironically, Samsung's entry into the DRAM market also began with a 64K DRAM license obtained from Micron. In its early years, Micron, seeking a substantial licensing fee, had granted Samsung a production license.
In fact, when Samsung obtained this license, it was much smaller than Micron and had virtually no brand awareness. However, it had the systematic support of the South Korean government and conglomerate system, was willing to continue investing despite losses, and, with a level of capital patience that Micron could not replicate, weathered one cyclical downturn after another.
By the mid-1990s, Samsung's DRAM production capacity had surpassed Micron's; by the 2000s, it had firmly established itself as the world's largest memory chip manufacturer, a position it holds to this day. It could be said that Micron essentially "fed" its most formidable competitor in the decades that followed.
But in any case, Micron managed to recover by "filing a complaint." However, Micron used the same survival logic again in 2002.
That year, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation into the DRAM industry, accusing several manufacturers of conspiring to manipulate memory prices. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Infineon were fined a total of over $600 million. Micron was also under investigation at the time.
However, Micron did not wait for the investigation to proceed. With the case already officially launched and Micron itself a potential defendant, it proactively contacted the Department of Justice and submitted internal evidence to implicate its competitors in exchange for immunity.
Whistleblowing on competitors and gaining protection by acting as a "tainted witness" is standard practice under US antitrust law. However, in an industry highly dependent on multilateral relationships, Micron's move was less than savvy. Ultimately, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Infineon were penalized, while Micron escaped unscathed.
Micron escaped both crises through less-than-honorable political means, earning it the reputation of a "political opportunist" within the industry. In a fiercely competitive market, without any structural advantages, Micron found a way to survive, which in itself is a skill in itself.
But "every gift that fate bestows comes with a price tag," and Micron had to pay the price. And Micron's price was hidden in that acquisition in 2013.
02 Missed out on HBM's golden decade of strategic planning
In February 2012, Steve Appleton, the CEO who had led Micron through a long and turbulent period, died unexpectedly in a private flight accident. His successor, Mark Durcan, took over in a time of crisis, and the first thing he acknowledged was an ongoing acquisition negotiation.
In July 2013, Micron completed its acquisition of Elpida Memory for approximately $2.5 billion. Elpida was the last vestige of Japan's memory industry, formed by the merger of the memory divisions of Hitachi and NEC, and filed for bankruptcy in 2012 due to overwhelming debt.
On the surface, it seems like a victory. But Elpida's technological legacy is far weaker than one might imagine. Yukio Sakamoto, Elpida's last president, stated at the bankruptcy press conference that "Elpida's technological level was very high." This wasn't wrong, but that technological level referred to a different path.
Before its bankruptcy, Elpida bet on mobile DRAM, following the trend of the smartphone market. The HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) technology route was practically nonexistent on its strategic map.
What is HBM?
If DRAM is a computer's "temporary draft paper," then HBM is its "top-of-the-line 3D version." It's like stacking multiple layers of DRAM chips vertically, like a three-dimensional pyramid, with thousands of tiny interconnected channels, resulting in bandwidth 10 times faster than regular memory. Regular DRAM is like a "single-story house," while HBM is a "multi-story parking garage." Although both use the same materials, HBM is specifically designed for AI chips (such as Nvidia GPUs), costing 5-10 times more and determining the ceiling of AI computing power.
Micron took over not only Elpida's 16,000 engineers, but also a completely different manufacturing process. Reports indicate that the Elpida plant, acquired in 2014, contributed 54% of Micron's global DRAM production. However, more than a year after the merger, due to incompatibility in processes, equipment, and process parameters between the Hiroshima and Boise plants, over half of the company's capacity is still operating under two separate process systems, resulting in significant waste.
In fact, Micron clearly listed a risk profile in its subsequent annual report, which explicitly acknowledged that "there are integration issues with products and process technologies."
In 2013, the same year Micron completed its acquisition, SK Hynix (formerly Hyundai Electronics), which had by then been renamed SK Hynix, released the world's first HBM chip. This HBM vertically stacked multiple layers of memory chips, using tiny vias (thousands per layer) with a diameter of about 10 micrometers and a depth of about 100 micrometers, and directly connected to the GPU, which could increase data throughput by several times or even tens of times.
Unfortunately, in the first few years after SK Hynix launched this product, it had virtually no commercial market. But in the HBM (Helio Bionics) sector, the value of time had already been quantified into an insurmountable market barrier.
In late 2022, the emergence of ChatGPT instantly ignited the demand for AI computing power and pushed memory bandwidth to the core bottleneck of the entire system. At that time, engineers in Silicon Valley stated that when training GPT-4, about 90% of the time was spent on data transfer rather than actual computation, and HBM was the key to unlocking this bottleneck.
This is why SK Hynix, which started planning 10 years in advance, gained a significant advantage, beginning to supply HBM3 to Nvidia in June 2022, while Micron didn't release its own HBM3 product until July 2023. This mere one-year difference was magnified into a huge chasm in the rapidly developing AI market.
At this time, SK Hynix held approximately 85% of the market share for HBM3, which the market desperately needed, while Micron, having missed a decade of golden development, only held about 3%. This perfectly illustrates a fundamental principle of the AI era: the time that cannot be bought with money is the true value in this competition.
However, the side that is at a disadvantage in terms of time accumulation resorts to its usual tactic.
03 The recurring "complaint" drama
In 2017, Micron's legal team took action again. Micron's competitors were getting smaller, but the countermeasures were exactly the same—extremely simple and brutal.
The previous two times, Micron's opponents were established industry giants: Japan's six major electronics conglomerates, South Korea's Samsung, and a price alliance formed by SK Hynix. This time, Micron's target is a newly established Chinese startup that has not yet achieved mass production— Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit (JHICC) .
Micron accused Fujian Jinhua and Taiwan's United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) of conspiring to steal its DRAM technology trade secrets. This transnational lawsuit quickly escalated into a political action.
In October 2018, the U.S. Department of Commerce added Fujian Jinhua to its export control entity list, cutting off its access to U.S. equipment and technology. A Chinese memory chip company that had just built its wafer fab and had not yet achieved mass production was thus strangled in its early stages.
Throughout the process, Micron's approach to competition was exactly the same as before: legal means to pave the way, government intervention to close the gap, and competitors to be eliminated.
For several years afterward, Micron continued to push Washington to tighten its control over China's storage industry. According to public documents, between 2018 and 2022, Micron spent approximately $9.54 million on political lobbying in the United States, of which about 67% of the lobbying was related to China.
In 2022, Micron announced a $100 billion investment to build a new wafer fab in New York State, in a district that happens to be the district of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, one of the main proponents of the Chip Act, and one of the beneficiaries of the subsidies provided by the Act.
Micron won the first two "complaints" with this strategy, but in 2023, the situation reversed.
In May of that year, the Cyberspace Administration of China announced the completion of its cybersecurity review of Micron products, finding that they "posed serious cybersecurity risks" and prohibiting operators of critical information infrastructure from purchasing Micron products.
Micron's CFO responded that the ban's impact on the company's revenue was "only in the single digits." However, this is not the case.
Because Micron established its presence in China very early, revenue from the Chinese market once accounted for a significant proportion of its global revenue, resulting in substantial losses. According to Micron's financial reports:
Fiscal Year 2023 : Due to China's countermeasures, Micron's revenue share from China dropped to 14%.
Fiscal year 2024 : Further down to 12.1%.
Fiscal year 2025 : This figure has fallen to 7.1%.
By the end of 2025, Micron was forced to announce its withdrawal from the data center server chip business in China. Faced with strong countermeasures from China, Micron failed to emerge unscathed this time. This setback is not an isolated incident, but rather a concentrated eruption of the systemic difficulties that Micron has long faced.
04 The Dilemma Under Triple Squeeze
In the semiconductor industry, Micron is unable to penetrate the high-end market, is being eroded in the low-end market, and the window to the Chinese market has closed. These three issues coincided at the same time, resulting in a series of serious and unavoidable problems for Micron.
First problem: Insufficient efforts to catch up in the high-end market.
Micron was the second vendor to receive NVIDIA certification at the HBM3E stage, earlier than Samsung, giving it a real head start. However, this "second" came at a cost. By the time Micron received certification, SK Hynix had already begun production curves for its next-generation products and was continuously optimizing yield rates, putting immense pressure on Micron. Industry analysts believe that even at the similar HBM3E stage, Micron's market share was still less than 20%, while SK Hynix's share had already stabilized at over 60%.
Second layer: Downstream markets are being eroded
CXMT's aggressive expansion into the low-to-mid-range DRAM market, priced at approximately one-third below market value, resulted in a roughly 50% year-on-year increase in shipments in 2025, rapidly expanding its market share from near zero to approximately 7%. Low-to-mid-range DRAM has consistently been Micron's most stable source of cash flow. However, the narrowing pricing margin in this segment has severely impacted Micron's revenue used to support high-end R&D. For Micron, falling behind in the high-end market means difficulty in expanding the market share of high-margin products; while the erosion of its low-end market share means a shrinking cash flow to support R&D.
The third factor: losing the Chinese market
The ban imposed by China on Micron has deprived it of more than just orders; it has deprived it of an irreplaceable opportunity to participate. The period from 2023 to 2025 is precisely the peak time for Chinese tech companies to build AI infrastructure. This demand includes a large amount of high-bandwidth memory and high-end DRAM—precisely what Micron wanted to sell, yet it couldn't secure a single order. Moreover, the AI server supply chain of Chinese tech companies was successfully established without Micron, while SK Hynix and Samsung secured the certification slots.
The series of setbacks led outsiders to label Micron as a "political opportunist." However, this only explains part of its survival strategy, not how it has survived the brutal industry cycles to this day. The true underlying capability that has enabled Micron to weather the storms is its unparalleled control over manufacturing costs .
05 The key is the accumulation of technical expertise over time.
Micron did indeed survive through underhanded political means, and even used this to suppress various competitors. However, objectively speaking, Micron only gained a temporary respite and suppressed its rivals, but it cannot fight price wars or weather cyclical downturns. Ultimately, competition is something Micron must rely on itself to succeed.
Samsung and SK Hynix are backed by conglomerates that can continuously invest even after years of losses, weathering the storm until the next cycle turns around. Micron, however, lacks this structure. It doesn't have a parent company that can continuously provide funding, and it has to earn each round of investment itself after each round of price wars—something that cannot be obtained simply by "complaining."
This forced Micron to make a tough decision: to continuously improve its technology and reduce manufacturing costs compared to its competitors, so that it could weather price crashes. This capability is a crucial foundation for Micron's survival and continued success to this day.
According to Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra:
Micron's DRAM chip has a cell area of approximately 66.26 square millimeters , smaller than Samsung's 73.58 square millimeters and SK Hynix's 75.21 square millimeters .
This means that Micron can cut more chips from the same wafer than its competitors, resulting in a naturally lower unit cost.
This advantage wasn't gained through subsidies or financial support from conglomerates; it stemmed from forty years of accumulated engineering expertise. For Micron, political maneuvering served as leverage, buying crucial time windows, but its exceptional manufacturing efficiency was the true factor that allowed it to establish itself in the manufacturing industry. These two aspects are not independent but rather an interlocking survival system; without either, Micron wouldn't be where it is today.
However, this combination also has its unavoidable limitations. Political maneuvering and manufacturing efficiency are competitive capabilities in existing sectors, which can help Micron survive, but cannot replace the time required for early planning in new sectors. Micron has survived to this day thanks to the cost advantages it has accumulated over forty years, but in the new sector of HBM, it is feeling the high cost behind the "time lag".
Micron has now secured HBM3E certification and is ramping up production, opening the window for the next-generation HBM4. Simultaneously, the company is continuously increasing its R&D investment, deepening its collaboration with Nvidia, and leveraging the Chip Act to develop new product lines. All of these efforts are essentially paying back the time debt incurred in the past.
After all, certification is just an entry ticket. From entry to stable mass production and then to profitability, it's still a marathon that can only be built up over time. But the competitors have never stopped. While Micron is struggling to fill the HBM3E capacity gap, the leaders are already optimizing the yield curve of the next-generation HBM4.
When the competition eventually becomes a contest of "patience," can a company that is good at using political leverage to buy time and using manufacturing efficiency to digest cycles win the next competition that needs to be tested over time?
Micron's answer lies hidden in the still-unfinished HBM4 wafers, and in a long wait that requires genuine patience and dedication.
