Micron joins $1-trillion club as AI race powers memory chip boom

Micron Technology briefly topped $1 trillion in market value for the first time on Tuesday, May 26, crowning a dizzying rally that has cemented the US’s largest memory chipmaker as one of the standout winners of the AI boom.

Micron’s shares were last up 17.4% at $881.6 after rising as much as 19.3% earlier in the session, with Tuesday’s boost coming after brokerage UBS increased its price target on the stock to $1,625 from $535 — the highest among the 46 brokerages covering the company, according to LSEG data.

The milestone, which underscores memory chips’ central role in AI infrastructure, also reflects a broader shift in the AI trade as investors seek out companies that can benefit from Big Tech’s massive spending plans after initially crowding into makers of graphics processors.

“The need for pure memory has increased rapidly over very short periods of time, and clearly, Micron sits at the center of it,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth.

“Today’s crossing of the $1 trillion mark for Micron is just an exclamation point on the story of the massive amount of demand needed to run data centers in this AI revolution.”

While Nvidia makes the powerful processors used to train and run AI models, Micron mainly produces memory chips used to store and move data. The company’s ascent gives the US a strong contender in a memory-chip race that has largely been led by Asia so far.

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, the world’s top memory chipmaker, has already hit the $1 trillion milestone, while SK Hynix is also closing in.

Samsung’s shares surged last week after it clinched an eleventh-hour deal with its South Korean union to avert a strike, though a union representing the conglomerate’s consumer electronics workers said on Tuesday it has asked a South Korean court to block a vote on the agreement.

Disruptions at the world’s largest memory chip maker could fuel price hikes at a time when the AI boom has already caused shortages.

Shares of Micron, long viewed as one of the semiconductor industry’s most cyclical names, have jumped more than eightfold in the last 12 months, thanks to strong earnings and supply chain constraints that have given it pricing power.

With technology companies racing toward artificial general intelligence, customers are committing to longer-term data center investments that have fueled a ​sharp rise in demand ​for advanced memory ⁠and storage, creating a supply crunch and driving price increases.

Micron has said its entire 2026 high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chip supply is already sold out, a sign of how far demand is outstripping capacity. Its next-generation HBM4 products are now in production.

The company emerged as one of the biggest institutional favorites in the first quarter of the year, according to regulatory filings. About 2,440 institutions disclosed new positions in the company, including Rockefeller Capital Management and Schroders.

The entry into the exclusive club signals a sharp rebound from the post-pandemic period when memory chipmakers grappled with a supply glut as demand for personal computers and smartphones weakened due to decades-high inflation.

Micron trades at 8.42 times expected earnings over the next 12 months, compared with 22.15 for the benchmark S&P 500 index and 26.23 for the Nasdaq 100. – Rappler.com

المصدر: Rappler (PH)