Micron launches new memory chips to keep up with AI processing
Micron announced its first 1y (1-gamma) DDR5 memory chip samples this week, and it says this is part of its contribution to systems that keep up with AI processing.
The company said being the first to market with 1y samples proves Micron’s continued technology and manufacturing leadership — and the Boise, Idaho-based company is extending the capabilities of this advanced node to its broader portfolio of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips. Those are coming In the second quarter.
Smartphones at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona have AI-powered features such as visual search, translation, and intelligent tools to unblur or erase objects in photos.
These innovations show how AI can transform smartphones into intuitive and context-aware toolsthat enhance our daily lives when supercharged with the right memory and storage.
Micron will sample 1y LPDDR5X 16Gb products to select partners for use in 2026 flagship smartphones, enabling industry-leading performance and up to 15% power savings — critical as energy-intensive use cases such as video- and AI-based apps make smartphone battery life more important than ever.
At MWC, Micron also announced mobile storage devices including the world’s first G9-based UFS 4.1 and UFS 3.1 mobile storage solutions. The G9 process node enables significant improvements in speed and power efficiency while allowing us to deliver scalable mNAND capacities from 256GB to 1TB at the industry’s highest performance.
These mobile storage solutions are now available in the small and ultra-thin form factors required for slim and foldable smartphone designs.
Micron said it partners with smartphone OEMs to engineer differentiated firmware features that solve their latest pain points and enable smoother, more intuitive experiences for end consumers. Micron’s latest UFS 4.1 solution delivers proprietary firmware features for flagship smartphones such as Zoned UFS for read/write efficiency, data defragmentation for 60% faster read speed, pinned WriteBooster for 30% faster random read speed and intelligent latency tracker for better debugging.
Most recently, Micron collaborated with Samsung on its Galaxy S25 suite of smartphones. Thesesmartphones deliver breakthroughs in natural language processing and are designed with Micron’smost power-efficient LPDDR5X and advanced UFS 4.0 solutions. The LPDDR5X improves powerefficiency by up to 10%.
Samsung’s Galaxy AI suite enhances user interactions with AI-powered features like call transcript summaries, message composition, creative tools and Nightography mode for optimized low-light photography.
None of these capabilities would be possible without ample internal storage to house the large amounts of data required for such on-device AI experiences, which is where our high-capacity UFS 4.0 comes in. This storage solution allows data to be processed quickly by doing so locally rather than in the cloud, in addition to ensuring greater privacy and control of your data.
Micron noted that AI in our smartphones and PCs are already beginning to anticipate our needs, manage our schedules and curate personalized content, enhancing our productivity, creativity and connectivitybeyond what we could have ever imagined.
New AI innovations such as multimodal agents can now simultaneously interpret and produce insights from various types of data from text, images — opening a whole new world of applications as compared to previous AI agents which were limited to handling one type of data. Another innovation, federated learning, allows AI models to learn from decentralized data sources while maintaining privacy. As these technologies mature, they will enable smartphones to predict our habits and patterns to anticipate our next move and offer suggestions to make life more streamlined.
As we move toward agentic and multimodal AI that autonomously reason, plan and execute complex tasks, a strong hardware foundation is critical. To keep pace with these rising memory and storage needs, Micron is constantly optimizing our roadmap and collaborating with the ecosystem to drive and shape what is possible, from ramping our mobile portfolio on our leading process nodes to exploring new architectures to optimizing memory performance and power for game-changing AI smartphones.
The memory and storage embedded in today’s smartphones play a pivotal role in enabling AI tasksand storing users’ important data, safely and securely on their device. Key factors — such as highbandwidth, low latency and power efficiency — are essential for handling demanding AI workloadsand delivering ultra-smooth user experiences.
