1.25.24
Memory spending was $965M in the quarter, up 40% sequentially. Almost 90% of this was to DRAM customers, so these sales were up 36% from the prior quarter. NAND saw a jump of around 70%, but from a historically low base. NAND spending is still only at 20% of peak levels. On the other hand, DRAM spending was a quarterly record. I suspect this is driven by purchases for advanced packaging, used in products sold to AI customers. For calendar 2024, the company expects WFE investment to be “slightly up” from the low levels of 2023 with expenditures focused on High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and leading-edge node development. The company is guiding their total revenue to be down in the first quarter of 2024, with memory customer spending also down. NAND and DRAM fabs are both at low utilizations and consumer markets are not at the levels that will return those utils to the high levels of past years. Even as their memory customers are more optimistic about the future in most recent meetings with them, those customers have not increased fab utilization much.
-S. Hughes (cyclical long MU)