New York, May 5, 2026, 10:04 EDT
Micron Technology shares climbed more than 9% early Tuesday, extending a rally that has pushed the U.S. memory-chip maker deeper into the center of the artificial-intelligence trade. The stock traded at $629.21 at 9:47 a.m. EDT, up $52.76 from Monday’s close, after touching $634.29; its market value stood near $718.6 billion.
The move matters now because investors are treating memory as a scarce AI input, not just a commodity chip category. High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is stacked memory that feeds AI processors data at high speed; DRAM is working memory used in servers, while NAND is flash storage. IDC said memory is now at the center of a broader AI-led shift in semiconductors.
That puts Micron in the same debate as SanDisk, SK Hynix and Samsung: whether AI data-center demand can keep prices and margins high for longer than past memory cycles allowed. A Zacks Investment Ideas article on Monday highlighted Micron, Alphabet and SanDisk as beneficiaries of AI-driven demand in memory, storage and cloud revenue.
Micron added fresh product news Tuesday, saying it had started shipping the 245TB Micron 6600 ION SSD, which it called the world’s highest-capacity commercially available solid-state drive. The company said the drive was built for AI, cloud, enterprise and hyperscale workloads and could cut rack needs by 82% versus hard-disk deployments with equivalent raw storage capacity.
Jeremy Werner, senior vice president and general manager of Micron’s Core Data Center Business Unit, said AI workloads are “driving massive growth in shared data.” IDC’s Jeff Janukowicz said in the same release that AI dataset growth was shifting storage economics “from individual drives to rack-level efficiency.” GlobeNewswire
Wall Street had already turned aggressive. Investing.com said Micron jumped 8.6% on Monday to a 52-week high of $589 after analyst price-target increases and demand signals from hyperscalers; D.A. Davidson’s $1,000 target, described as the Street’s highest, argues AI could extend the memory cycle and support pricing. Barron’s identified the analyst as Gil Luria and said he initiated Micron at Buy with that target.
The company’s own numbers have fed that view. Micron reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $23.86 billion, up from $8.05 billion a year earlier, GAAP net income of $13.79 billion and non-GAAP earnings of $12.20 a share. Chief Executive Sanjay Mehrotra said memory had become “a strategic asset” in the AI era; Micron guided for fiscal third-quarter revenue of $33.5 billion, plus or minus $750 million, and gross margin of about 81%. Micron Technology
The hyperscaler signal is also stronger. Reuters reported that SK Hynix rose to a record in Seoul on Monday after large U.S. technology companies, including Alphabet, signaled AI spending would not slow, with combined outlays set to top $700 billion this year. Amazon said memory component costs had “skyrocketed” and that capacity was not enough for demand. Reuters
SanDisk has given investors a second read on the same shortage. The company told Reuters it signed five long-term supply deals, including three worth a combined $42 billion, and CEO David Goeckeler said the aim was to move away from the memory industry’s “boom-bust cycle.” Its quarterly revenue more than tripled to $5.95 billion. Reuters
The Yahoo Finance-linked investor commentary went further, framing Micron as a possible next $1 trillion AI-chip stock. That remains a market argument, not a company forecast; even after Tuesday’s early jump, Micron’s market value was still well below that level.
The risk is the old memory risk, just in a hotter market. If hyperscalers slow spending, if Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron add supply faster than demand expands, or if customers push back on long-term contract terms, today’s tight pricing can loosen. Micron also warned in its March results that forward-looking statements about demand, performance and manufacturing investments are subject to risks and uncertainties.
