How McDonald's French Fries, a Dentist's Basement, and Raw Idaho Stubbornness Created America's Secret AI Superweapon

By 1983, Micron had pulled off something remarkable: their chips were roughly half the size of anything coming out of Japan. What they lacked in capital and scale, they compensated for with engineering obsession. Smaller chips meant more chips per silicon wafer, which meant lower cost per unit. They were out-engineering empires from a dental basement funded by french fry money.

Then 1985 happened, and the Japanese manufacturers decided to end the game. They flooded the global market with below-cost memory chips in a move that annihilated the American semiconductor industry. Intel abandoned memory. National Semiconductor quit. Texas Instruments pulled back. One by one, every American player either folded or fled.

The Japanese giants — NEC, Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu — fell like dominoes. Japan's final holdout, Elpida, went bankrupt in 2012. And who bought the remains? Micron. The dental-basement potato-funded startup from Idaho bought the corpse of Japan's last memory chip company.

Today, the global memory industry is an oligopoly. Three companies control virtually the entire market: Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea, and Micron in Idaho. That's it. Micron is America's only seat at the table in one of the most strategically vital industries in computing. And right now, AI is turning that seat into a throne.