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As if there wasn’t already preposterous levels of demand for computer memory, Micron has identified two new classes of device that will soon be gobbling up RAM in huge quantities. Apparently, both autonomous cars and humanoid robots will need hundreds of gigabytes of the stuff.

Speaking during Micron’s recent earnings call with Wall Street’s best bean counters, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra explained how both driverless cars and other kinds of bots will seen generate huge demand for memory.

“The average car today has less than L2 ADAS capability, containing approximately 16 GB of DRAM,” Mehrotra said, referring the industry standard Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems classification for autonomous vehicles that starts out at level zero or “L0” with no automation and scales up to level five or “L5”, indicating a fully autonomous car that has no human controls at all.

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“Vehicles with L4 autonomy require over 300 GB,” he went on to explain, adding, “As more advanced ADAS and smart cabin adoption scales, we expect robust long-term growth in automotive memory demand.”

He likewise predicted that humanoid bots will be another source of demand for RAM comparable to autonomous cars. “Rapid improvements in AI are supercharging the capabilities of robots. We believe we are on the cusp of a 20-year growth vector in robotics and expect robotics to become one of the largest product categories in the technology world.

“Humanoid robots will be AI-enabled and will be powered by a compute platform that rivals that of a high-end L4-capable automobile, thus requiring significant memory and storage capacity.”

Micron says it is actually tooling up to produce “the industry’s first automotive-grade 1γ LPDDR5 DRAM” to service that particular market. But increasing capacity to meet all this demand is going to take time. “We expect both DRAM and NAND industry bit demand in calendar 2026 to be constrained by supply,” Mehrotra said, and that despite overall RAM supply across the market growing by 20%.

All in all, this is a familiar tale with a new twist. It’s ultimately still AI-driven, just not the usual data center stuff but instead AI-powered devices. If Micron is right and we really are “on the cusp of a 20-year growth vector in robotics,” well, it’s hard to see markets for components like memory chips normalising for a very, very long time indeed. Sorry about that.

PCGamer.com