$MU $ASML Micron has largely stopped building its new Taoyuan memory fab, Bloomberg reports. It's a $3–4.5bn project that includes ASML tools, and the dispute holding it up is with a union of 2,335 members at a site with about 3,000 of Micron's 15,000 Taiwan staff. What's paused is new capacity. Micron says its Taiwan operations are running normally and it's confident customers won't be affected. The Taichung union, which covers most of its Taiwan staff and production (about 11,000 members among 12,300 employees there), signed an agreement on Oct 21. Bloomberg says a small amount of work continues at the Taoyuan site to keep it safe, and then that stops too. DigiTimes dates the halt to mid-October, which lines up with the dispute. The Taoyuan union won a strike vote on Oct 7 with 1,994 of 2,012 votes, 11 union officials held a 24-hour strike on Oct 22, and the second round of talks on Oct 27 ended with no consensus. Per Bloomberg, Micron executives are worried that agreements reached with the local union could be overturned. The next Taoyuan round is tomorrow, Nov 6. The reason this matters beyond one site: Taiwan makes roughly 60% of Micron's conventional memory chips, per Bloomberg, and DRAM is already short. Every month this fab sits idle pushes its output further out, at a time when memory buyers mostly want to know when new supply arrives. MU is at $759.72 premarket, down 4.5%, on a day Asian tech sold off broadly, so not all of that move is this story. Does tomorrow's round get construction restarted, or does the pause run into next year?