
The motivation, it appears, is a rather acute shortage of DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) chips. This isn’t merely a “shortage” in the everyday sense; it’s a tightness of supply that is, quite literally, driving the price of these tiny silicon wafers into the stratosphere. Micron, therefore, is “rushing to add manufacturing capacity,” which is a perfectly reasonable response, assuming one accepts the premise that building enormous, incredibly complex structures is a viable solution to a supply problem. (It’s like trying to solve a leaky faucet by constructing a hydroelectric dam. Technically possible, but… ambitious.) The current plan involves doubling Micron’s 450-acre Boise campus with two new 600,000-square-foot factories. The first is slated to open in mid-2027, the second before the end of 2028. Both will be dedicated to churning out DRAM chips for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) – the sort of memory that powers the increasingly demanding artificial intelligence data centers. (One imagines these data centers as vast, humming brains, perpetually hungry for more and more memory. It’s a slightly unsettling thought.)