If you are still waiting for price cuts on storage products, then Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra’s latest statement may disappoint you. In his view, storage price reductions are almost impossible to achieve in the short term, and the market is still far from returning to normal. Mehrotra noted in the interview that the current wave of AI is still in its early stages. With the rise of artificial intelligence assistants, higher-speed and larger-capacity storage devices have become strategic assets that support the full capabilities of AI. This explosion of demand has completely changed the supply and demand structure of the storage market.
As the AI inference end reaches an inflection point, the expansion of token generation requirements has placed unprecedentedly high requirements on memory speed and capacity.
Currently, the entire storage industry is facing an extremely tight supply situation, and due to technical thresholds and equipment limitations, capacity improvement cannot be completed in a short time.
The CEO further explained that the core problem currently plaguing the industry is not market demand or pricing strategy, but the capacity gap that suppliers simply cannot solve.
This situation of shortage of supply will not only not get better in the future, but may further intensify. This sense of tightness has been directly reflected in the financial performance of the company.
According to Micron’s forecast, artificial intelligence’s demand for DRAM and NAND flash memory is expected to exceed half of the industry’s total market size this year. This means that more than half of the storage resources will be occupied by AI-related businesses, and the share left in the general consumer electronics market will be severely squeezed.
Sales of PCs and mobile devices are expected to post double-digit declines, hit by a double whammy of supply constraints and rising prices.
However, for those high-end PCs that can run AI workflows, 32GB of large-capacity memory has gradually become the mainstream configuration choice on the market.
In the AI era, memory is no longer just a component, but the most important strategic asset in the hands of customers.
In order to cope with growing demand, Micron is continuing to increase investment in global manufacturing bases and is expected to set a number of performance records again in the upcoming third fiscal quarter.
