TL;DR
Micron hit $1.27 trillion market cap, briefly surpassing Meta and Tesla. Revenue 4x’d to $41.45B on AI memory demand. 16 supply deals aim to prevent a bust.
Micron Technology briefly surpassed Meta and Tesla in market valuation on Thursday, closing the week at roughly $1.27 trillion. The stock has soared over 236% in the past month alone, reaching $1,132 a share. Before mid-2025, it spent years below $100.
The surge followed blockbuster third-quarter earnings. Revenue quadrupled year on year to $41.45 billion. Profits jumped from $1.88 billion to $28.2 billion. Micron forecast fourth-quarter revenue of between $49 billion and $51 billion. Wall Street, which has been looking for the next Nvidia-scale AI investment, became even more bullish.
The driver is the AI data centre buildout, which has created a shortage of system memory chips, both DRAM and NAND, particularly High-Bandwidth Memory. A single AI server requires magnitudes more memory than a laptop. Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle are buying up large quantities, forcing every other company that needs memory to hoard it as well. The shortage has already driven up consumer electronics prices and is predicted to persist into 2027.
The historic problem for memory makers is that building manufacturing capacity takes years and costs billions, and demand often falls just as new capacity arrives. Micron is trying to insulate itself by signing long-term supply agreements. The company said it has closed 16 strategic customer agreements across data centre, consumer, and auto segments, including a multi-year deal with Anthropic covering HBM, DRAM, and SSD supply alongside a strategic investment in Anthropic’s latest funding round.
William Blair analyst Sebastien Naji said demand growth continues to outpace the rate that new cleanroom space can come online. “Given the strong likelihood of continued ASP growth in the coming quarters and improving revenue visibility thanks to a rapidly expanding set of long-term agreements, we see potential for more durable earnings growth,” Naji wrote.
Whether Micron can sustain this without a bust cycle is the open question. Memory has historically been one of the most cyclical businesses in tech. Goldman Sachs pegged the 2026 DRAM supply-demand gap at 4.9%, the most severe shortage in 15 years. For a company that most consumers associated with memory cards for PCs, the transformation into a $1.27 trillion AI infrastructure stock is as rapid as anything the semiconductor industry has produced.
