The demand for storage chips brought by AI continues to heat up, but Micron has hit the brakes on a major expansion plan in Taiwan.

According to Bloomberg, Micron has suspended the construction of a $4.5 billion (approximately 30 billion RMB) storage chip factory in Taoyuan City, Taiwan. This suspension is related to ongoing labor disputes in the area. Micron's management is increasingly worried about the uncertainties facing the project, including the risk that a prior agreement with local unions may be overturned.

This means that in the context of ongoing tight supply of global DRAM and HBM, and as storage manufacturers increase capital investments, a significant expansion project for Micron in Taiwan has encountered new variables.

$4.5 billion investment plan hits the pause button

The paused project is located in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, with an investment scale of approximately $4.5 billion.

According to insiders, Micron has essentially stopped the construction work on the factory. Since the relevant internal discussions have not been made public, the insiders requested anonymity.

More importantly, Micron has informed the relevant government departments and one supplier in Taiwan about the suspension of the construction plan. This indicates that the decision is not a simple adjustment of the construction schedule but involves arrangements for the project's future advancement.

Reports suggest that the core concern for Micron's management is the continuing tension in local labor relations and the possibility that the agreement reached with the unions may be overturned. These uncertainties are affecting the company's judgment regarding the project.

Currently, Micron has not publicly disclosed the specific future arrangements for the project, including when construction will resume and whether there will be adjustments to the original investment plan.

From bonus distribution to strikes, labor disputes escalate

This event did not happen suddenly.

Since the beginning of this year, with the rapid growth in demand for AI servers, the DRAM and HBM markets have continued to perform strongly, leading to improved performance and profits for storage manufacturers like Micron. Meanwhile, employees' demands for bonuses and profit-sharing mechanisms have been increasing.

On October 7, a union representing Micron's Taoyuan employees announced that 99% of the 1,994 voting members supported obtaining strike authorization in a strike authorization vote.

The main demand of the union is for Micron to propose a clear, long-term profit-sharing mechanism rather than just a one-time bonus arrangement.

In fact, Micron had previously announced its employee reward plan for the 2026 fiscal year, providing rewards for over 60,000 employees worldwide. Among these, employees in Taiwan received a cash bonus of 1 million New Taiwan Dollars, approximately $31,400.

However, this arrangement did not quell the controversy.

The Taoyuan union believes that a one-time bonus cannot replace a long-term, institutionalized profit-sharing mechanism and that the company announced the reward plan during labor mediation without prior agreement with the union.

On October 21, labor disputes in Micron Taiwan further deepened.

On that day, Micron and the Taichung union announced that they had reached a labor agreement and decided to withdraw from the originally scheduled mediation process. However, the Taoyuan union did not change its position and still plans to hold strike actions, as the two parties have not reached an agreement on the specific figures for the profit-sharing plan.

It should be noted that Micron has two major unions in Taiwan, in Taoyuan and Taichung, representing employees from different regions. The agreement reached in Taichung does not mean that the labor dispute in Taoyuan has been resolved.

As of now, the differences between the two parties regarding bonuses and profit-sharing mechanisms have had a real impact on Micron's investment plans in Taiwan.

How important is Taiwan to Micron's storage strategy?

This event is noteworthy partly because of Taiwan's important position in Micron's global storage chip landscape.

Micron currently has about 15,000 employees in Taiwan and is one of its important DRAM production bases, also undertaking advanced DRAM, HBM-related production, and packaging testing tasks.

In terms of production layout, Taoyuan mainly handles front-end DRAM wafer manufacturing, while Taichung is Micron's largest operational base in Taiwan, involved in advanced DRAM, HBM, and packaging testing businesses.

This also means that Taiwan is not only an important base for Micron's traditional DRAM production but also a crucial support point for its entry into the AI storage market.

On October 15, Micron launched a new advanced packaging and testing facility in Taichung. Micron's President and COO Manish Bhatia stated at the time that the entire capacity the factory will produce by 2027 has been sold out and predicted that the growth rate of the HBM market will continue to outpace the entire DRAM industry, at least until 2028.

This statement actually reflects Micron's judgment on future storage demand: the demand for high-bandwidth memory from AI servers continues to grow rapidly, and advanced storage capacity has become a key competitive factor in the industry.

From this perspective, the suspension of the $4.5 billion factory project in Taoyuan is clearly not a trivial construction issue.

Currently, the global storage market is undergoing a new round of expansion cycle. Micron needs to continue investing in DRAM, HBM, and other areas to meet the increasing demand from AI infrastructure construction. Any changes in the expansion progress of significant production bases could affect its future capacity layout.

However, it is important to distinguish that the publicly available information indicates that the construction plan for the $4.5 billion factory in Taoyuan has been paused, which does not mean that all of Micron's production activities in Taiwan have been affected, nor can it be concluded that global DRAM or HBM supply will immediately change.

What truly deserves attention is that after AI has pushed storage chips into a high boom cycle, the challenges faced by storage manufacturers are no longer just capital expenditure, equipment delivery, and capacity construction. How to stabilize the workforce and address profit distribution demands has also begun to become an important factor influencing the pace of expansion.

For Micron, whether the $4.5 billion investment plan can be restarted ultimately depends on whether both labor and management can find a sustainable solution.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到[email protected]，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。