HBM

Micron broke ground on July 4 on a ¥1.5 trillion ($9.3 billion) expansion of its Hiroshima fab to scale next-generation DRAM and HBM for AI, with Japan's METI pledging up to ¥500 billion in subsidies and equipment installation set to begin in the second half of 2028.

SK Hynix will list ADRs on the Nasdaq on July 10 to raise up to $29 billion, potentially the largest ADR offering on record, with all proceeds funding new chip fabs, advanced packaging, and EUV scanners.

All three major memory chipmakers crossed $1 trillion in market cap within weeks as AI demand, sold-out HBM4 capacity, and a landmark UBS upgrade triggered a historic valuation surge.

South Korean memory giant reported 37.6 trillion won in operating profit on 52.6 trillion won in revenue, a 405% year-over-year jump and the highest operating margin in its history at 72%, as HBM and high-density server DRAM rode an AI-driven demand wave.

The two companies held a formal kick-off event in Milpitas, California, advancing HBF as a new memory tier that promises 8-16x higher capacity than HBM at comparable cost, with first samples expected in the second half of 2026 and inference devices arriving in early 2027.

Google Research unveils TurboQuant, a training-free compression algorithm that reduces LLM key-value cache memory by 6x and boosts inference throughput up to 8x, sending SK Hynix and Samsung shares down 5-6 percent.

Micron Technology posted record fiscal Q2 revenue of 23.9 billion dollars, nearly tripling year over year on surging AI memory demand, while guiding fiscal Q3 to 33.5 billion dollars -- a single quarter that would exceed its entire annual revenue through fiscal 2024.

Both GPU makers are shifting mainstream production to 8 GB models as DRAM prices surge 180 percent, MSI calls 2026 its hardest year since founding, and IDC warns the sub-$500 PC market may vanish by 2028.