Your next car night need 300GB of RAM, and so will humanoid robots

Summary

Autonomous cars will need 300 gigabytes of DRAM or more, and humanoid 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 ...