The Memory Giant That Can’t Make Chips Fast Enough

Micron leads AI memory boom with 196% revenue surge, $1,000 price target, and 2026 HBM capacity sold out amid $725B hyperscaler capex.

The hyperscalers aren’t just talking about higher memory costs — they’re building their budgets around them. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently described storage expenses as having “gone through the roof,” while Microsoft quantified the impact of rising component costs at roughly $25 billion. Meta, meanwhile, pointed to higher component prices as a key driver behind its elevated 2026 investment plan. Collectively, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are expected to spend $725 billion on capital expenditures next year — a 77 percent jump from last year’s record.

At the center of that spending spree sits Micron Technology, the only American producer of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips in a tight oligopoly alongside SK Hynix and Samsung. The stock closed Monday at a fresh 52-week high of €493.10, having surged over 80 percent since the start of the year and nearly 600 percent from its 12-month low. In dollar terms, the shares hit $592.77 — another all-time high.

The rally is built on numbers that are hard to ignore. In its fiscal second quarter, Micron posted revenue of $23.86 billion, a 196 percent year-over-year surge. The company is guiding for $33.5 billion in the current quarter, and analysts are throwing around estimates ranging from $33.7 billion to $40.9 billion — a spread that underscores just how uncertain even the professionals are about the pace of the AI investment cycle.

A Structural Shift, Not a Cyclical Blip

Wall Street is increasingly treating Micron as a secular growth story rather than a traditional memory play. D.A. Davidson initiated coverage with a Street-high price target of $1,000, with analyst Gil Luria arguing that artificial intelligence is creating a longer memory cycle than usual. His logic: computing power and storage demand feed off each other in a self-reinforcing loop. Luria projects Micron will generate $393 billion in revenue by fiscal 2030, with earnings per share of $139. His target is based on a price-to-earnings multiple of 10 for that year, discounted back at 10 percent over three years.

TD Cowen raised its target to $660, pointing to a critical data point: Micron’s HBM capacity for 2026 is already completely sold out. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra has acknowledged that the company can only meet 50 to 67 percent of demand from key customers in the medium term. Meanwhile, TrendForce expects DRAM contract prices to rise as much as 63 percent in the current quarter, and NAND prices could climb 75 percent.

Goldman Sachs calculated that Micron alone accounts for 51 percent of all earnings revisions in the S&P 500 since the start of the Middle East conflict — a staggering concentration of profit momentum in a single stock.

Insider Sales and Capacity Concerns

For all the bullish noise, there are warning signs. Company insiders — including the chief business officer and the EVP of worldwide sales — sold shares in April at prices between $345 and $466. No open-market purchases were recorded. Chief People Officer April Arnzen recently unloaded 40,000 shares, and sales chief Sumit Sadana disposed of stock worth roughly $10 million. While Arnzen’s trades were executed through a pre-arranged trading plan — standard practice during rapid price appreciation — the lack of insider buying is notable.

The other risk is capacity. Micron is pouring more than $25 billion into new fabrication plants this fiscal year, or roughly $6.4 billion per quarter. If AI demand falters or competitors simultaneously bring new capacity online, the industry could face the kind of oversupply that has historically crushed memory prices.

The stock’s relative strength index sits at 73.5, signaling overbought conditions. And while the rally has fueled speculation about a stock split — the last one occurred in 2000 — management has made no official announcement.

What’s Next

The next major catalyst arrives June 24, when Micron reports fiscal third-quarter results. Before that, the company will appear at two JEDEC industry conferences in mid-May, where the sector will discuss new standards for AI memory. The Q3 numbers will test whether the company can deliver on the lofty expectations already baked into the stock price.

For now, Micron finds itself in a rare position: a memory maker with pricing power, sold-out production lines, and a customer base that can’t spend fast enough. The question is whether the market has already priced in the next three years of that story.