Micron Technology, the Fortune 500 memory chipmaker, is breaking ground on a new high-bandwidth memory (HBM) packaging facility in Singapore. The company expects operations to begin next year with “meaningful expansion” capacity to happen in 2027. Micron will invest $7 billion in the project through to the end of the decade.
It’s the city-state’s first facility dealing with HBM, key to the AI boom that’s powering chipmakers like Nvidia and TSMC to new heights.
“As AI adoption proliferates across industries, the demand for advanced memory and storage solutions will continue to increase robustly,” said Sanjay Mehrotra, president and CEO of Micron, in Singapore on Wednesday.
Micron projects that the HBM market will grow to more than $100 billion by 2030, up from about $4 billion in 2023.
AI applications rely heavily on memory storage as generative AI models, like the one that underpins ChatGPT, rely on data to create their responses. HBMs, akin to a stack of small and powerful memory chips, can move large amounts of data quickly and with lower power consumption. Nvidia and AMD use HBM in their graphics processing units, which are used to train AI models.
South Korea’s SK Hynix is currently considered the market leader in HBM. Yet Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed at CES that a recently released Nvidia GPU, the RTX 50, uses Micron’s HBMs.
Micron’s new facility in Singapore would give the city-state a bigger role in the global chip supply chains sustaining the AI boom. The U.S.-based company’s current HBM production takes place across three regions: The U.S. handles design and process development; Japan handles memory fabrication; and Taiwan handles advanced packaging and testing.
Micron and Singapore
Micron’s presence in Singapore dates back to 1998. Since then, the company has grown its footprint from two manufacturing plants and an assembly and testing site to include four wafer fabs and more advanced automated test facilities.
It employs about 9,000 people in Singapore; the planned HBM facility will create at least 1,400 new jobs.
The U.S. memory-chip maker currently manufactures NAND memory in Singapore, a type of memory chip used in products like mobile devices, smart home systems, and even data centers.
Singapore makes almost all of Micron’s NAND memory. NAND contributed just over 25% of Micron’s revenue for the quarter ended Nov. 28, 2024. HBM, which falls under DRAM, a different category of memory chip, contributed around 74% of Micron’s revenue over the same period.
