Micron has secured another major vote of confidence from the Taiwanese government, winning approval for an additional NT$4.7 billion (approximately $149 million) in subsidies to expand HBM research and development in Taiwan. Combined with an earlier grant awarded in 2021, the total public support now approaches NT$10 billion, or roughly $318 million, making Micron the largest single recipient of Taiwan’s flagship industrial R&D subsidies to date.
The funding, approved by Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs under its A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, supports a three-year project running from November 2025 through October 2028. Micron’s total budget for the effort is NT$11.75 billion, with the company covering close to 60% of the cost itself.
The goal is to develop and industrialize leading-edge, high-performance, and HBM technologies in Taiwan at a time when HBM has become one of the most strategically constrained components in the global semiconductor supply chain, driven by surging demand from AI accelerators, data center GPUs, and high-performance computing systems.
HBM as strategic infrastructure
HBM has shifted from a niche technology used in a handful of HPC accelerators into a foundational element of modern AI hardware. Unlike conventional DDR or GDDR memory, HBM stacks multiple DRAM dies vertically and connects them through an ultra-wide interface, delivering orders of magnitude more bandwidth per watt.
Current HBM3E stacks already provide several terabytes per second of bandwidth, feeding GPUs such as Nvidia’s H200 and AMD’s MI300X without becoming a performance bottleneck. Next-gen HBM4 pushes this further by doubling the interface width to 2048 bits and supporting taller stacks with higher-density dies. In doing so, HBM4-class memory enables larger models, faster training, and more efficient inference without relying solely on brute-force compute scaling.
This, unfortunately, has also turned HBM into a choke point. AI accelerators cannot ship without it, and the ability to produce advanced HBM at scale now directly limits how many high-end GPUs can reach the market. As a result, memory suppliers have found themselves graduating from being interchangeable commodity vendors to fully-fledged semiconductor industry behemoths whose roadmaps influence the entire AI hardware ecosystem.
That explains why governments are increasingly willing to subsidize HBM development, and Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs has been explicit that memory is the missing pillar in its semiconductor ecosystem. The island already dominates advanced logic manufacturing and chip design, but has historically relied on foreign suppliers for cutting-edge memory technology. Supporting Micron’s HBM R&D is a way to anchor that capability locally.
Micron’s position
(Image credit: SK hynix)
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