Micron Technology has begun building a major expansion of its semiconductor factory in Hiroshima, western Japan, in a bet on surging demand for chips that power artificial intelligence.
According to Bloomberg's Mari Kiyohara, the company broke ground on the roughly ¥1.5 trillion project — about $9.3 billion — on Saturday. Micron describes the investment as part of a global ramp-up aimed at meeting AI demand.
The expanded plant is slated to begin shipping high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, from the summer of 2028, Bloomberg reports.
A bit of background helps explain why that timeline matters. HBM is a specialized type of memory chip that stacks layers together to move data far faster than conventional memory. It sits alongside the powerful processors that train and run large AI models, and it has become one of the tightest bottlenecks in the AI supply chain. Companies building AI systems have been racing to secure enough of it.
Micron is one of only a handful of firms in the world capable of producing this kind of advanced memory at scale, which makes its capacity decisions consequential for the broader industry. The Hiroshima expansion signals that the company expects AI-driven demand to keep climbing well into the second half of the decade, rather than cooling off in the near term.
The project also underscores Japan's renewed importance as a manufacturing base for cutting-edge chips, as governments and companies work to spread production across more locations.
Why it matters: Micron's multibillion-dollar commitment is a concrete signal that the companies supplying the physical hardware behind AI are betting the boom has years left to run — and that the memory chips feeding it will stay in high demand.