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

Here's a sentence I never expected to type: the hottest AI company on the planet is headquartered 700 miles northeast of Silicon Valley, in Boise, freaking Idaho, and the reason it exists at all involves frozen potato products and a dentist with a really spacious basement.

The company is Micron Technology. Its stock has nearly quadrupled. Its products are so in-demand that the entire 2026 production run sold out before January 1st. And yet, depending on who you ask, it's either the single most undervalued AI stock on the market or a ticking time bomb that's about to repeat every brutal crash cycle it's been through since the Reagan administration.

Let me walk you through both sides. Buckle up — this one gets weird.

In 1978, Micron's founders set up shop in the basement of a dental office. Not a garage, like every Silicon Valley origin myth — a dental office. In Idaho. Their first gig was designing a 64K memory chip for a company called Mostek. When that deal spectacularly collapsed, they made a decision that was, by any rational analysis, completely unhinged: instead of just designing chips, they decided to manufacture them.

To appreciate how insane this was, you need to understand the memory chip business. Memory chips are commodities. A gigabyte from Samsung works exactly like a gigabyte from anyone else. You win on price. You win on scale. You win by having the kind of capital reserves that a startup in the American Mountain West does not, historically, tend to have.

By the early '80s, Japanese conglomerates had essentially colonized the entire memory industry. They had government subsidies, near-infinite capital from their keiretsu structures, and the manufacturing discipline to pump out chips at a pace nobody could match. For a handful of engineers above a dentist's chair in Boise, the odds were somewhere between "laughable" and "statistically indistinguishable from zero."