Micron Breaks Ground on $9.3B Hiroshima HBM Plant
What did Micron just announce in Hiroshima?
Micron Technology broke ground on July 4, 2026 on a ¥1.5 trillion — roughly $9.3 billion — expansion of its factory in Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. The new manufacturing building will target production of HBM4E (high-bandwidth memory, fourth generation enhanced), the stacked DRAM chips that sit next to GPUs inside AI accelerators. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra attended the ceremony and said, "Memory demand is increasing like never before."
High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is a type of stacked DRAM that enables AI semiconductors to process more data faster by using wider data channels than conventional memory.
How much is Japan's government contributing?
Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has committed up to ¥500 billion toward the project's capital costs, according to The Next Web's reporting on the groundbreaking. When research and development support already pledged is added in, Tokyo's total backing for Micron's Japanese operations reaches roughly ¥775 billion — covering close to half of the new investment.
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