Nvidia’s stock run has been extraordinary, and Wall Street has been hunting for the next big AI winner. Increasingly, they’re landing on Micron — a company most people associate with the memory cards they used to shove into their digital cameras.
Micron briefly surpassed Meta and Tesla in market valuation on Thursday, hitting a market cap near $1.27 trillion. The stock has soared over 236% in the past month, closing Friday at $1,132 a share. For context, it spent years below $100 before mid-2025.
The catalyst is the AI data center buildout. A single AI server needs magnitudes more memory than a laptop, and Micron makes both DRAM and NAND — particularly High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) that AI systems demand. The result is a global memory shortage that’s driven up prices across consumer electronics from Apple products to Xbox consoles. The crunch is expected to last into 2027.
Micron’s quarterly earnings reflected the boom: revenue quadrupled year-over-year to $41.45 billion, and profits skyrocketed from $1.88 billion to $28.2 billion. The company forecasts Q4 revenue between $49 billion and $51 billion.
The long-standing risk for memory chip makers is the boom-bust cycle. Building new fabs is expensive and slow, and demand often drops just as capacity comes online. Micron argues it’s different this time, pointing to 16 long-term supply agreements with customers like Nvidia and Anthropic. Analysts remain cautiously optimistic — but nobody knows for sure if this cycle ends differently.
