요약
수요 감소에 대한 언급은 1도 없었음.
오히려 AI 데이터센터로부터의 수요가 매우 강하다는 이야기가 대부분.
AI는 거대한 사이클이며 데이터센터 중심에서 엣지로 퍼져나갈 것임을 강조.
HBM4에서 더 높은 마진이 날 것이냐는 질문에는 긍정적으로 답했으나 즉답을 회피함.
하이라이트
John Nguyen Vinh
So maybe Sumit, you could just maybe walk us through the pre-announcement and just talk about what were the drivers of upside in the quarter for you.
Sumit Sadana
Micron is performing really well, executing really well across the board. Our prior revenue guidance for fiscal Q4 was $10.7 billion at the midpoint of the guidance range. We updated that to $11.2 billion this morning, plus/minus $100 million.
this is primarily about pricing and pricing has been strong across end markets.
we have had really strong execution with 4 nodes in a row in DRAM, first to market and several nodes on the NAND side as well.
John Nguyen Vinh
And do you think that some of this upside and strength that you’re seeing were due to some of these tariff-related pull-ins?
Sumit Sadana
es. I mean there may be some customers in certain end markets that are concerned about tariffs and taking some action regarding pull-ins.
So this is, as you can see in the gross margin improvement from guidance to our current update, very significantly driven by pricing improvements.
John Nguyen Vinh
Okay. Any particular end markets you want to call out where you saw better-than-expected pricing?
Sumit Sadana
Well, the pricing has been positive on a positive trend across the end markets. The demand has been very strong on the AI and data center side.
we expect just those 5 companies to be over $400 billion of CapEx spending and a large chunk of that is going towards infrastructure, servers and data centers. And so the demand on the AI side has been very strong, and you’re also seeing several of these companies increasing their forecast for CapEx looking out several months and quarters.
And all of these trade ratios we have spoken about for a while of HBM wafer is approximately 3:1, HBM wafers to DDR5 is creating a supply squeeze for the non-HBM portion of the market. And the demand from all the other sectors of the market are fairly steady.
John Nguyen Vinh
Great. I do want to dive in, obviously, into your AI position in a minute. I had one more, just a follow-up question. I’m getting a lot of questions on. Obviously, we know there’s been shortages in DDR4, LPDDR4. To what extent did that also contribute to your strong results here in the near term?
Sumit Sadana
So if I look at the contribution of DDR4 itself to these upsides, it’s a very small contribution to the overall upside. The upside is largely coming from all of the data center markets, PC and mobile markets. Those are where broad DDR5, LP5, those are the markets that are driving the upside from a pricing perspective.
John Nguyen Vinh
Maybe just help us understand what your vision and positioning is within the AI infrastructure market and how you see that trending for you over the next several years?
Sumit Sadana
We expect very significant transformative capabilities coming out of these data center deployments of artificial intelligence. And right now, it is very data center-centric, all of this growth in AI, but I have high confidence that these technologies will proliferate to the edge.
John Nguyen Vinh
So HBM4, as you referenced, is going to have a CMOS-based logic die that you and your peers are all fabricating, it sounds like at TSMC. So does the introduction of that logic die maybe level the playing field versus the competitors? Or does it help you differentiate versus your competitors?
Sumit Sadana
They will start qualifying HBM4 when their own GPU or ASIC platforms power on and get to that qualification phase, and then it will be a multi-month qualification for all of the HBM4 and so that HBM4 will ramp when that qualification is finished, but it’s not started in earnest until those platforms, those newer platforms of our customers get ready to test.
John Nguyen Vinh
Do you also think that when we get to HBM4E, is your expectation is that you could have differentiated pricing. So today, you have better performance in some of your memory chips, but it is still a commodity market, so everyone gets the same pricing. When we get to HBM4E, could that be the end of commodity pricing in the memory market?
Sumit Sadana
So in a lot of different products, we have been able to create that differentiation. So I don’t think of it as the same pricing for all the customers.
RAM is as it is a very strong, very robust ROI business across the cycle. HBM, we expect to be even higher ROI than that. And then HBM4E, because of this customization and more direct, longer-term deeper relationships and more of an ASIC-like model with customers get the — that portion of the DRAM business into a very different business model with ASIC-like features, which is really a positive as well.
