美光在博伊西投资500亿美元建厂，催生百万富翁与城市繁荣

Micron. Once an under the radar semiconductor company, now one of AI's biggest winners, is building big in its hometown of Boise, Idaho, transforming it into America's latest boomtown. Newly minted millionaires, gated communities with sprawling homes and a downtown filled with new businesses and new people. It's been an influx of Californians here. Probably about every 10% of the people I know are transplants. So much more development.

A lot of restaurants popping up. Change is certainly here. That change is driven largely by the AI boom and the insatiable need for the chips that make it possible. Every AI processor from Nvidia or AMD needs memory so it can rapidly access data to execute tasks, and there isn't enough of it. And that's what micron makes and why it's spending $50 billion to expand in Boise, building two huge new fabs. The first is set to pump out memory chips next year.

It does require that we think about how we are able to staff with 17,000 jobs. We've had to open up talent pathways that didn't exist or haven't existed in the U.S. For sure, for for decades. CNBC went to Boise to see Micron's construction and ask locals about all the changes firsthand. Micron is the only U.S. based company that makes the high bandwidth memory HBM that's most crucial for AI. HBM is made up of stacks of general purpose Dram, which is also what's used in consumer electronics.

Now, AI is gobbling up so much that the prices of memory and electronics like Apple MacBooks and iPads are soaring. So is Micron's stock, and with it the net worth of its employees. But the memory industry is known for being in a classic boom and bust cycle. And I think. So goes Micron, so goes Boise. Micron started here. You know this is Micron's hometown. Micron was founded in Boise nearly 50 years ago in the basement of a dental office, and by 1981, its first chip plant was up and running here.

Remember our name when choosing your career. Boise remains Micron's headquarters and a big hub for R&D and packaging. Micron manufactures some chips in Virginia, but most of its leading edge memory production happens overseas at fabs in Taiwan, Japan and Singapore. With Boise's new fab online next year, that's about to change. The excitement around micron here locally is pretty amazing. While SK Hynix and Samsung, both based in Korea, ship more of that coveted high bandwidth memory for AI, micron is the only one building a front end fab to manufacture memory on U.S. soil.

Sk Hynix is building a packaging fab in Indiana, where memory chips will be stacked and wired together, but all its new manufacturing fabs are being built in Korea, along with new fabs from Samsung there. That's why Micron's project in Boise is such a big deal, along with an even bigger $100 billion campus with up to four fabs. Micron is building in Clay, New York, where it just poured the first concrete. This is critical capability, which also brings with it for micron alone Grid thousand American jobs.

The U.S. government is giving Micron up to $6.2 billion of Chips act funds to support the project. Construction on Micron's first Boise Fab began in 2023 with planned completion in 2027. The second Boise Fab planned for late 2028 is still a patch of dirt nearby. It's far from Micron's only presence in the area, but it will be the largest. In the last 12 months, in talking to friends and people that I know that work for Micron, they're not only excited about the growth that they physically can see, but they're excited about the growth they see electronically in their stocks.

One big way Micron attracts all these workers is by offering stock awards to employees, a considerable opportunity for wealth, considering Micron's performance over the last year. We actually had one gentleman who was very blessed with the amount of stock that he had, mostly Micron, and when he came back in after eight days and we said, what has changed in your life since we met last time? And he said, I'm $1 million richer in eight trading days.

JT Belnap's wealth management firm, now focuses almost entirely on managing money for Micron employees. Whenever you see a company exploding like Micron, it's so exciting. But what you don't realize is it's equally stressful when you have a stock that goes from $100 a share to well over $1,000 a share, and you have people concerned, how long is that going to last? Well, you don't know when that window is going to close.

Whether or not they feel that the stock is going to continue to rise or not. They're just going to take their profits now and invest it into real estate. Mortgage broker Gerald Robinson consulted with four Micron clients looking to buy homes just in the last few weeks. We're just seeing an influx of people coming from out of state that are building. We're seeing birth rate where, you know, people are buying their very first home.

And so we're just really not seeing that keeping up with the amount of houses that are needed. Which of course changes the housing market in what until now has been a relatively affordable area. There's been a 4.5% rise in homes sold above their list price since last year, topping national averages. I think the median price in Boise is still hovering around 560, 575, so there's still plenty of opportunity here and still plenty of room to grow.

But now we're just seeing the lower incomes maybe getting a little bit more and more priced out. Micron expects to create about 3,500 direct jobs at the new sites, adding to about 7,000 people there today. While some Boise residents we talked to are fans of the changes, others worry about traffic and strain on resources. From 2020 to 2025, Idaho's population growth of 10.4% was already the fastest in the nation. The city has certainly grown out, and the out is tough for people that live in Boise because the traffic is much more than it used to be.

And it's not just Micron. Meta is building an $800 million data center 20 miles west in Kuna, Idaho, that it says will create 100 long term jobs. There's a flurry of new offices from Micron suppliers like Lam Research and cleanroom builder excite, plus contractors coming in for lucrative jobs helping to build Micron's fabs. I'll be closing a house for a electrician that came in from out of state, and Micron is paying him an exorbitant amount of money to be an electrician on that fab.

And he's just buying a house because of that. Micron's project includes utility and water treatment buildings to support the resource intensive process of making chips. Local utility Idaho Power told CNBC that it does not expect large load growth, including Micron's expansion, to increase electric bills for other customers. Water is also a concern for some we spoke to as smoke clouded the sky from active wildfires nearby.

We have a drought going on and you can drive out as you're going to McCall off the 55 and they're building another 10,000 houses and it's like, where are they getting the water? You look at the hills around them, they're all they're all brown. Water for the Boise plants will come from the Boise River groundwater and municipal supply. Micron told CNBC that it intends to reuse essentially all of the water that can be recycled there.

When you're scaling that many people in a short amount of time, there certainly are challenges such as transportation, such as housing, and we've been partnering at the state county level and as well as local level on solutions. Idaho native April Arnzen runs the Micron Foundation, which she said has given $3 million in grants to local schools and nonprofits. Micron has a bigger plan for $75 million of spending on workforce education and community development across the state over ten years, and a new child care center near the Fab buildout.

It also has a chip camp for middle school students, a micron sponsored training fab at Boise State University, and an apprenticeship program at the College of Western Idaho. There are at least five buildings