Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra is making a bet that sounds like science fiction but carries very real implications for the semiconductor supply chain. Humanoid robots, he says, will require roughly ten times more memory than today’s Level 2+ autonomous vehicles. And that demand wave is set to begin before the decade is out.
The numbers behind the forecast
To understand the scale Mehrotra is describing, start with vehicles. Higher-autonomy cars are expected to exceed 300 GB of DRAM per vehicle by 2026. Now multiply that by roughly ten. That’s the memory footprint Mehrotra envisions for a single humanoid robot.
The automotive ramp alone is substantial. L2+ and higher-autonomy vehicles are forecast to make up over 20% of the market mix by 2026, with that figure surpassing 40% by 2030.
Mehrotra frames this as the beginning of a multi-decade demand cycle. Not a one-time bump. Not a cyclical peak. A structural shift in how much memory the world needs, starting in the latter half of this decade and extending well beyond.
