Micron Technology just delivered one of those quarters that makes you wonder if the analysts covering the stock even bothered to update their models. Revenue nearly tripled to $23.86 billion — crushing the $20.07 billion consensus — while adjusted earnings per share came in at $12.20 versus the $9.31 Wall Street expected. And here’s the kicker: guidance for next quarter is $33.5 billion, which implies another 200%+ jump from a year ago.
Let that sink in. A company that made $8 billion last year in the same quarter is now guiding for $33.5 billion. This isn’t growth. This is a structural transformation playing out in real time.
The driver, unsurprisingly, is AI. Every new generation of Nvidia’s GPUs packs in more high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and there simply isn’t enough supply to go around. Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix are all scrambling to add capacity, but demand is outpacing every expansion plan on the board. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said both AI and conventional servers are facing a “lack of adequate DRAM and NAND supply” — a statement that would’ve sounded absurd in the memory industry’s cyclical past, where oversupply was the perennial problem.
The margin story is equally dramatic. GAAP gross margin more than doubled year-over-year to 74.4%, up from 36.8%. Memory has historically been a commodity business with razor-thin margins and brutal pricing cycles. A 74% gross margin in memory chips would’ve gotten you laughed out of any semiconductor conference five years ago. Today, it’s the new normal for HBM products that go into AI accelerators.
Micron’s cloud memory business surged 160% to $7.75 billion, while mobile and client revenue more than tripled to $7.71 billion. Net income hit $13.8 billion — up from $1.58 billion a year ago. The company is also deep into ramping HBM4 production for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, with next-gen HBM4e slated for 2027.
The stock, which has already tripled since early 2025 and gained another 62% this year, actually slipped after earnings. That tells you something about how much expectation is already baked in. But Mehrotra signaled that capital expenditures will “step up meaningfully” in fiscal 2027, with over $10 billion in additional construction costs as Micron builds massive new fabs in Idaho and New York. Initial production in Idaho is expected by mid-2027, with the $100 billion New York campus starting wafer output in late 2028.
Here’s the bottom line for investors: among the 10 most valuable U.S. tech companies, Micron is the only one that’s up this year. Oracle is down 22%, Microsoft and Tesla are in double-digit declines. Memory — boring, cyclical, commodity memory — has become the hottest sector in tech. The AI supercycle has turned Micron from a perennial “value trap” into something that looks a lot more like a growth stock with pricing power. The question now isn’t whether the boom is real. It’s whether the stock already prices it all in.
