Shares of memory and storage-related companies, including Micron Technology Inc (NASDAQ:MU) and SanDisk Corp (NASDAQ:SNDK), are trading lower on Wednesday.

The move follows a technical announcement from Alphabet Inc's (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google Research regarding AI efficiency.

Google Unveils TurboQuant Algorithm

On Tuesday, Google researchers introduced "TurboQuant." This set of advanced quantization algorithms enables massive compression for large language models (LLMs).

According to the Google blog, the technology "optimally addresses the challenge of memory overhead in vector quantization."

The breakthrough focuses on the key-value (KV) cache. Google describes this as a "digital cheat sheet" that stores frequently used information.

High-dimensional vectors capture complex AI data but consume vast amounts of memory. Google reported that TurboQuant reduces key-value memory size "by a factor of at least 6x" without sacrificing model accuracy.

Enhanced Efficiency For LLMs

TurboQuant utilizes two secondary methods: PolarQuant and Quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss (QJL). In testing with open-source models like Gemma and Mistral, the system achieved an "8x performance increase" over unquantized keys on NVIDIA Corp.'s (NASDAQ:NVDA) H100 GPU accelerators.

Google stated these techniques allow "building and querying large vector indices with minimal memory."

Price Action: SanDisk shares were down 3.17% at $649.20, Western Digital shares were down 1.29% at $291.80, and Micron Technology shares were down 3.46% at $381.86 at the time of publication on Wednesday, according to Benzinga Pro data.

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