Unlocking the Token Economy: Micron Powers AI's KV Cache
Micron, Friday, September 4th, 2026
Micron explains how the KV cache underpins AI inference economics and where memory and storage relieve the bottleneck.
Micron engineers Sudharshan Vazhkudai, Sujit Somandepalli, Ramkarthik Ganesan and Wes Vaske explain what happens beneath the surface every time a user queries an AI model.
The post centers on the key-value cache, the store of attention state that grows with context length and drives much of the memory pressure in modern inference.
Because the KV cache determines how many tokens a system can serve at what cost, it sits at the heart of what Micron calls the token economy. The authors map how memory and storage choices across the hierarchy relieve that bottleneck and improve throughput per dollar.