The Circuit
The Circuit
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg
EP 163: Breaking the Memory Wall: Micron’s Strategy for the AI Era
52 minutes Posted May 5, 2026 at 1:00 pm.
Introduction and Guest Welcome
How the AI Cycle Differs from Past Volatility
Anticipating the Explosive Growth of AI
The Long-Term Sustainability of the AI Market
The "Memory Wall" in AI Inference
Explaining KV Cache and Context Windows
The Memory Hierarchy: From HBM to SSDs
Scaling for Billions of Simultaneous Users
Solving the Power and Efficiency Bottleneck
Why AI is Driving a Storage Shortage
Personal AI Agents and Persistent Memory Needs
Innovations in Ultra-High-Capacity SSDs
Accelerating the Pace of Engineering Innovation
Market Misunderstandings and the Future Potential of AI
The Global Race to Build New Fabs
Closing Remarks
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52:10
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Show notes

This episode of The Circuit features Jeremy Werner, SVP and GM of Micron’s Core Data Center Business Unit, discussing the transformative impact of AI on the memory and storage industry. Werner explains that the industry has shifted from a traditional cyclical model to a period of sustainable growth, driven by the unique demands of AI training and inference. He highlights the emergence of a "memory wall" in inference, where massive amounts of high-speed memory and storage are required to manage expanding context windows and avoid redundant recomputation. The conversation also covers Micron's efforts to innovate across the memory hierarchy—including HBM4 and ultra-high-capacity SSDs—to solve the data center's critical bottlenecks of power and physical space.