Micron pauses construction at Taoyuan Fab 11E

Fab 11E was designed to make high-bandwidth memory and DRAM, the components that feed AI data centers. The report of the halt did not say whether the pause affects current production, customer deliveries or its published financial expectations.

What Micron paused

Construction at the Taoyuan site has mostly stopped, with only minor safety work continuing to keep the site safe, Bloomberg reported. Micron has told Taiwanese officials and a supplier it plans to suspend construction, according to Briefs, while the Taoyuan government said it has not been notified of a suspension and hopes Micron and its employees can reach a consensus. The two accounts conflict. Micron has not released a statement about the suspension itself. TradingView reported the plan as scrapped and said the suspension could not be independently confirmed.

"Taiwan plays an important role in Micron's global footprint, and our operations today continue as normal," the company said. It added that it was confident of maintaining business continuity for its customers.

The Taoyuan union dispute

The Taoyuan union wants Micron to allocate 15% of operating profit to global employees and to pay incentives entirely in cash, according to union Chair Jerry Lin. Lin says the demand mirrors profit-sharing at Samsung and SK hynix. Micron reached a deal in October with the larger Taichung union, but some employees object to the terms and a revision could be required. Fewer than 3,000 workers belong to the Taoyuan body, while most of Micron's Taiwan staff sit in the larger Taichung one. The Taoyuan group is recruiting Taichung members in a bid to annul the current pact and restart negotiations, Lin said.

The Taoyuan union held a one-day strike last month.

Micron has already announced a bonus that could give as much as five times the annual salary of some eligible workers, Tom's Hardware reported.

Mark Hsu chairs the Taichung union. He said the October agreement is valid under the law and that he respects the Taoyuan faction's push to build a broader organisation.

Why the Taoyuan plant matters

Micron planned to equip Fab 11E with top-end ASML gear and had slated the plant to come online in 2028. One person said Micron budgeted $3 billion to $4.5 billion for the complex. Fab 11E was set to add HBM and DRAM capacity using those tools, so a pause could matter for supply. Taiwan accounts for 60% of Micron's DRAM output. Micron employs 15,000 people in Taiwan, about a quarter of its global workforce, and its outlays there total nearly $50 billion over three decades. A suspension raises the possibility Micron could reassess its broader Taiwan manufacturing hub, Briefs reported. In US trading, Micron's stock fell by as much as 7.3%. Even as it considers slowing in Taiwan, Micron has committed $250 billion to manufacturing in the US and is expanding in Japan and Singapore.

What happens next

Negotiations with the Taoyuan union continue, and Micron said it looks forward to reaching an agreement. Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs said it supports the legal agreement Micron reached with the Taichung union and will help resolve the differences. The ministry said the agreement would raise junior engineers' average annual packages to more than double, to NT$4 million, and senior engineers' to triple, to NT$6 million. Engineers at listed local semiconductor firms earned NT$2.58 million on average in 2025, according to 104 Job Bank. The next scheduled meeting is on 6 November.