Autonomous cars will need 300 gigabytes of DRAM or more, and robots will need similar quantities, leading memory-maker Micron Technology to predict it has a long and happy future ahead of it.
The company on Wednesday announced its results for the second quarter of 2026, and reported revenue of $23.86 billion, almost triple the $8.053 billion it posted for Q2 2025. The result represented a $10.3 billion revenue jump from the previous quarter.
Net income reached $13.8 billion, rather better than the $1.58 billion from the same quarter in 2025.
CEO Sanjay Mehrotra attributed those results to “an increase in memory demand driven by AI, structural supply constraints and Micron’s strong execution across the board.”
The company is milking this for all it’s worth. Mehrotra said Micron is now signing “strategic customer agreements” that differ from its previous long-term agreements because they involve “specific commitments over a multi-year time horizon for improved visibility and stability in our business model.” The company has signed one of the new agreements covering five years, and is pushing for others with the argument they help customers to plan their affairs, too.
The CEO also said Micron’s efforts to bring new manufacturing processes online will deliver later this year, and help the company to boost output by 20 percent.
Mehrotra sees a blip in the PC and smartphone markets, in which he said device shipments may “decline in the low double-digits percentage range” this year, due to memory shortages.
But he sees long-term upside in both classes of device.
“Over time, we expect the value of on-device AI to drive strong memory content growth in PCs and smartphones,” he said. “We see an unprecedented set of opportunities for memory and storage to enable the AI era across market segments and expect to meaningfully increase our R&D investments in fiscal 2027.”
Some of that research will go towards exploration of high-bandwidth flash memory (HBF), a proposed new memory tier that would be slower and cheaper than RAM but faster than memory used in solid state disks. HBF’s backers, SK Hynix and SanDisk, suggest it as ideal for inferencing workloads.
Asked by a financial analyst if Micron is working on HBF, Mehrotra said the technology “has some positive attributes, such as capacity, but it has the limitations that NAND has, such as write speed as well as power and retention.”
“Therefore, there will be potentially some workloads where this may be a possible solution, but it is really early, and what is needed is engagement with the customers in terms of really understanding the business value proposition of HBF. We, of course, continue to study this.”
The CEO was more optimistic about cars and robots.
On the road, Mehrotra believes that as auto-makers introduce more vehicles capable of driverless operations in a geofenced area (L4 autonomy), bills of materials will go from 16 GB of memory to over 300 GB, creating “robust long-term growth in automotive memory demand.”
And probably robust long-term price increases for cars, too.
The CEO shared his belief that we are “on the cusp of a 20-year growth vector in robotics and expect robotics to become one of the largest product categories in the technology world.” Bots, he said, will need “a compute platform that rivals that of a high-end L4-capable automobile.” So that’s another 300GB of RAM and plenty of solid state disk in every future clanker.
Revenue from robots is years away. Next quarter, Micron thinks revenue from existing devices will reach $33.5 billion, give or take $750 million, a vast jump from the $9.3 billion revenue from Q3 2025. Mehrotra said Micron would grow faster, if only it could build fabs faster. Sadly, that means memory shortages will continue for the foreseeable future.
Despite Micron beating guidance and market expectations, investors cooled on the company’s stock in after-hours trading, sending it from a closing price of $461.73 to $441.28. ®
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