HT Micron lands $16M from Brazil's development bank for memory chips
What's the deal? HT Micron SemicondutoresDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a semiconductor company in São Leopoldo near Porto Alegre, has raised US$21.7M (roughly $16 million) in debt financing from BNDESDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Brazil's development bank. The money comes through the BNDES Mais Inovação program.
What's the endgame? The funds will go toward research and modernising the plant to expand assembly, packaging, and testing of memory devices using LPDDR5X technology. That standard — the most widely adopted low-power DRAM in high-performance products — is largely imported in Brazil.
Why it matters: LPDDR5X memory powers smartphones, tablets, notebooks, automotive systems, high-performance computing, and AI workloads. Building it domestically cuts Brazil's reliance on imports.
Why now? It is the second major loan HT Micron has secured from BNDES in recent years. In 2023, the company took a US$25.3M loan from the bank, nearly the whole of a US$26.9M plant investment.
What's the context? HT Micron was a flagship of the Workers' Party industrial policy for semiconductors, with then-president Dilma Rousseff attending the factory's 2014 opening. Early projections spoke of 360 million chips a year and 800 direct jobs — output equal to about 25% of national demand for a market then worth about $25 billion.
The company started as a joint venture between Korea's Hana MicronDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Grupo ParitDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. After economic troubles and a split between the Korean and Brazilian partners from 2015, the Korean side bought control in 2017.
What could go wrong? The current size of HT Micron is unknown; its last public figure was a 2019 projection of US$153.5M in revenue.
The signal: "BNDES financing supports the layer that takes the longest to form in semiconductors, which are the engineering teams, the characterization laboratories and the supplier chain," said Willyan Hasenkamp, director of institutional relations. The loan reflects continued state backing for domestic chip capacity in a market dominated by imports.
Read more: baguete.com.br
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
