Micron Technology’s production and supply chain prepared to deal with any disruption
“As an organization, we’ve been very agile and been able to comply to the needs and wants of any government. We’ve met the requirements, there’s no impact to our business here and its business as usual for us,” says Amarjit Sandhu, Corporate Vice President, Assembly & Test NAND Operations, Micron Technology for Malaysia.
With 11 manufacturing sites globally, Micron Technology has plans spread out across the Asian continent. In Southeast Asia, the American semiconductor company has three plants – three in Malaysia and one in Singapore.
As a leader in memory and storage components production, the plants in Malaysia and Singapore play a key role in the global semiconductor supply chain. According to Amarjit Sandhu (pictured below), Corporate Vice President, Assembly & Test NAND Operations, Micron Technology for Malaysia, the increased investments in AI by companies globally has led to an increase in components needed to support the data centers and infrastructure that enables AI.
“The semiconductor industry is a community whereby everyone has to come together to complement each other to enable AI. We are very much in the memory and storage business and companies like NVIDIA, Intel and AMD can’t be successful without a company like us. If we are successful, they are successful,” said Sandhu in a recent interview with CRN Asia at its plant in Batu Kawan, Penang.
The 145,000 sqm plant is Micron’s largest in Malaysia and started operations in 2020. With over 5,000 staff including 300 in its R&D division, the Batu Kawan plant assemblies the NAND Flash Memory, Compute DRAM, DIMMs/Memory Modules as well as client and enterprise SSDs.
Given the significant role the plant plays in the semiconductor supply chain, Sandhu commented that they need to ensure of continues production without any disruption. As such, it needs to ensure that it continues to meet all regulatory requirements, be it locally or globally.
On the recent AI Diffusion ruling set by the US government, Sandhu mentioned that Micron Technology remains committed to make sure they comply and meet all the requirements that have been set.
“Since Trump 1.0, we’ve been seeing announcements coming out. Being an American company, we are very mindful of the American regulatory requirements. Our commitment is to make sure we comply with it and meet the requirements. So typically, in any process, when the first announcements are made, our legal team and our local team will try to understand what it means and translate it into deployment activity. Hence, whatever that has been announced, be it recently or the past, we’ve gone through the process,” explained Sandhu.
“As an organization, we’ve been very agile and been able to comply to the needs and wants of any government. We’ve met the requirements. To simplify it, there’s no impact to our business here and its business as usual for us,” added Sandhu.
When asked if the regulations would impact their supply chain, especially since Micron Technology has a huge partner ecosystem, both locally and regionally, Sandhu pointed out that the impact from the COVID-19 pandemic had now prepared them to map out their supply chain better and not by over-relying on a particular country or partner.
“We have a good mapping of our supply chain. Not just for regulatory requirements, but in any event of any atrocity or any challenge or natural disaster, we have a system of trying to make sure we have whatever is needed. For example, sometimes we have an earthquake in Japan. Do we have alternates? Likewise in Taiwan, sometimes we have earthquakes. Does it affect our suppliers? Our supply chain is pretty robust, and we've been able to kind of manage that with minimum impact. So even for geopolitical tension, there's not been anything that is significant that requires some regrouping and such. It's business as usual,” said Sandhu.
On meeting the demands of customers, Sandhu highlighted their recent earnings call showing demand for enterprise SSD and high-density memory DIMMs, which Micron has been able to respond to in a very short period of time.
“Our revenue is about 70% to 75% from memory and 30% to 25% on storage. While the memory market is a lot bigger compared to the storage market, we are anticipating a high profit margin for storage due to the demand for AI infrastructure. You need to have storage for AI and having the right product is important,” explained Sandhu.
In terms of products, Sandhu pointed out they are leading in the development of the HDM3E chip, when compared to their competitors, SK Hynix and Samsung. The high bandwidth memory chip is the industry’s fastest, highest capacity chip to advance GenAI innovation.
While SK Hynix is also dominating the industry, Sandhu stated Micron is well ahead of the competition, especially with products going into NVDIA Blackwell. The Blackwell GPU architecture features six transformative technologies for accelerated computing, which will help unlock breakthroughs in data processing, engineering simulation, electronic design automation, computer-aided drug design, quantum computing and GenAI.
Interestingly, despite stating that regulations haven’t had any impact on Micron’s productions and supply chain, NVIDIA on the other hand has voiced concerns about the new rulings.
Micron will also see the HBM4e, the next generation of the technology, to go into production in 2026 and 2027. Sandhu believes competitors like Samsung are “well behind and are hurting” because of this.
Earlier this year, Micron had broken grown on its new HBM advanced packaging facility in Singapore. The new fab, which will be adjacent to Micron’s current facilities in Singapore is expected to see operations begin in 2026 and will support Micron’s total advanced packaging capacity beginning in calendar 2027 to meet the demands of AI growth.