This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) shares plunged 10% on Monday, and the sell-off was largely triggered by a new memory compression algorithm unveiled by Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL).
The algorithm, called TurboQuant, promises to reduce memory usage by as much as six times while delivering up to eight times faster performance with zero accuracy loss.
The announcement spooked investors because a 6x reduction in memory requirements could theoretically reduce the number of memory chips needed for AI applications by roughly 83% . This poses a direct threat to Micron’s recent growth story, which had been fueled by surging AI-driven demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and NAND chips .
Concerns over the sustainability of AI memory demand compounded existing investor worries about Micron’s aggressive capital spending plans, which are expected to exceed $25 billion . The stock had already been trending downward since its March 18 earnings report before the Google news accelerated the decline
