Micron Technology: J.R. Simplot's Potato Money, Fab One and a $1T AI Boom

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Micron Technology started in Boise, Idaho, in 1978, founded by Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson and Doug Pitman as a semiconductor design consultancy. In 1981 they decided to make chips themselves, building a plant called Fab One to produce 64K DRAM, the short-term working memory of a computer. Because a fab needs clean rooms, atomic-scale machinery and vibration-proof buildings, the money came from local Idaho businessmen, most importantly potato billionaire J.R. Simplot. Micron went public in 1984. In 1991 it launched a RISC processor and supercomputer effort with up to a gigabyte of RAM, then scrapped it in 1992 and moved the engineers back to memory. In the 2000s, Micron researchers Gurtej Singh Sandhu and Trung Doan pioneered atomic layer deposition high-k films and pitch double patterning, which let memory keep shrinking.

Joe Parkinson retired in 1994 and Steve Appleton ran Micron until February 2012, when he died piloting an experimental Lancair aircraft at the Boise airport, and Mark Durcan stepped in. In 2017 Micron sued China's state-backed Fujian Jinhua and Taiwan's UMC over DRAM trade secrets; the Justice Department indicted Fujian Jinhua in 2018, and in early 2024 Judge Maxine Chesney acquitted it in a non-jury verdict for insufficient evidence. In May 2023 China's Cyberspace Administration barred major infrastructure firms from buying Micron products. Demand for high bandwidth memory for AI then pushed Micron, under CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, to a $1 trillion market value in May 2026.

• High bandwidth memory stacks chips vertically and links them with copper through-silicon vias.
• In 2024 a jury ordered Micron to pay $445 million to Netlist, and the patent office later invalidated one of those patents.
• Chinese chipmaker YMTC sued Micron in 2023 over eight patents.
• With CHIPS Act support, Micron committed $15 billion in Boise, $100 billion in Clay, New York, and $250 billion in the U.S. through 2035.
• In December 2025 Micron said it would end its Crucial consumer brand by early 2026 to focus on data centers and AI.