Why Micron Is So Excited About Artificial Intelligence

Memory specialist Micron (NASDAQ:MU) sells both DRAM, a type of computer memory that's used in virtually every kind of computing device, and NAND flash, which is rapidly gaining traction for high-performance data storage applications as it's quicker and more efficient than hard disk drive-based storage. Micron's business has continued to benefit from what seems like an insatiable amount of demand for both DRAM and NAND in applications such as mobile phones and data center servers. One of the sub-segments within data center servers is the market for servers that handle machine learning, commonly referred to as artificial intelligence, processing tasks. That sub-segment is small today, with data center chip giant Intel estimating the market at around 7% of total data center server shipments in 2016, but it's also, according to Intel, the fastest growing. The companies that make the processors that perform these machine learning computations are clearly very excited about the artificial intelligence opportunity as it means they'll get to sell a lot more computing power over the years.