Memory is a sellers game for now, but Micron wants multi-year deals

Memory shortages have been good for the three major producers' bottom line, but US semiconductor company Micron wants multi-year commitments as insurance against billion-dollar fab spend.

Micron reported a 196% increase in revenue year over year in the last quarter. AI-driven demand meant the company has been able to keep raising prices for DRAM and NAND.

"We are seeing an acceleration in NAND-based demand in the data center due to AI use cases such as vector database and KV cache offload, and due to growing share of SSDs in capacity storage tiers." Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra

Data centre orders now make up more than 50% of Micron's total addressable market (TAM). It pushed DRAM prices up as much as 67% and NAND prices by nearly 80% over the quarter – still slightly below industry standards where prices have more than doubled, according to Counterpoint Research.

In a Q2 earnings call Wednesday, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said the US manufacturer has also signed its first five-year hardware commitment, and was discussing similar deals with “multiple” others.