Micron Technology announced a $100 million venture fund on Wednesday that will invest in artificial intelligence startups. The company is betting that broader use of the technology will increase sales of the company's memory chips in data centers where the algorithms are trained and the systems where they are used to spot imperfections in products on a manufacturing line or to understand human speech. "These trends are at the heart of the biggest opportunities in front of us, and increasingly require memory and storage technologies to turn vast amounts of data into insights," said Sanjay Mehrotra, the company's chief executive, in a statement. The neural networks at the heart of machine learning are growing more and more complicated. Handling them means using not only more compute but also more memory and storage.