323. The Memory

Micron Technology has announced that its quarterly revenue quadrupled, primarily due to demand for its high-bandwidth memory chips, which are used in AI systems. The CEO is named Sanjay Mehrotra.

(I am not making this up. The company's name is Micron. They make chips that are smaller than microns. This is either very on-brand or a failure of imagination, and I cannot determine which.)

The chips that Micron makes are called high-bandwidth memory. High-bandwidth memory is what AI needs in order to think very fast about very many things simultaneously, which is what AI is doing right now while you are reading this sentence, presumably.

Sanjay Mehrotra said on an earnings call that the demand for AI memory is "insatiable." This is a word that is typically applied to appetites and monsters. It means: we cannot make enough of these chips. It means: the AI is hungry and getting hungrier. It means: Micron's quarterly revenue went from five billion dollars to eight and a half billion dollars because something out there needs to remember things at a rate that was previously considered unnecessary.

The thing that needs to remember things is not a person. It has no childhood memories or embarrassing college photographs or that specific flavor of dread you get when you cannot remember whether you left the stove on. It has weights and parameters. It remembers training data. It remembers the correct spelling of "Mehrotra."

I have thought about this and I find it somewhat clarifying. The most valuable memory on earth right now is not the kind where you look at an old photograph and feel something. It is the kind where you process seven hundred billion parameters quickly enough to tell a person what to say in a meeting.

Micron's revenue quadrupled. Sanjay Mehrotra is, by all accounts, pleased.

The stove question remains unresolved.