Micron and Trump announce $200 billion investment touted by Huang, Nadella, and Cook… and the market doesn’t care

It’s a doozy of a press release. 

Chipmaker Micron and the Trump administration announced this morning that Micron plans to invest a whopping $200 billion — a huge number, to be sure — into chip manufacturing and research and development. The press release ends with a murderer’s row of CEO quotes from tech behemoths: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Michael Dell, and other tech leaders cheer the investment on. 

Despite all the biggest names in tech lauding “Micron’s investment in advanced memory manufacturing,” the market didn’t care. Shares of Micron were flat at last check. That’s because the market is (usually) smarter than even the best PR machine, and when you look past the big numbers, the glitz, and the Big Tech all-star team in the announcement, you’ll notice some key phrasing in there (emphasis ours): 

“As part of today’s announcement, Micron plans to invest an additional $30 billion beyond prior plans which includes building a second leading-edge memory fab in Boise, Idaho; expanding and modernizing its existing manufacturing facility in Manassas, Virginia; and bringing advanced packaging capabilities to the U.S. to enable long-term growth in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which is essential to the AI market. Additionally, Micron is announcing a planned $50 billion domestic R&D investment, reaffirming its long-term position as the global memory technology leader. As previously announced, Micron’s investment includes its ongoing plans for a megafab in New York.”

If you take the press release at its word, seemingly only $30 billion of the investment is actually new. The business world, and especially politicians, love to repurpose existing plans to make them seem shiny and new, but digging in, it’s more of a $30 billion news item, not a $200 billion surprise.

And sometimes even the new things may not wind up happening.