A 596% Bet on Micron: One Fund’s Massive Stake Signals a New Memory Era

Micron's stake balloons 596% to $23.9M, HBM sold out through 2026, revenue up 196%, and Bank of America lifts target to $950 amid AI infrastructure scarcity.

Central Asset Investments & Management Holdings HK Ltd didn’t just add a few more Micron shares to its portfolio — it ballooned its position by 596.4%, building a stake worth roughly $23.9 million. That single move, disclosed in a recent filing, captures a broader conviction taking hold across Wall Street: memory chips have shed their commodity skin and are now a bottleneck asset in the artificial intelligence boom.

The fresh capital pouring into Micron reflects a structural shift that has upended the traditional cyclical narrative. Where the stock once rose and fell with PC demand and inventory gluts, it now trades as a proxy for AI infrastructure scarcity. The shares closed above $800 in U.S. trading for the first time earlier this week, while in Frankfurt the stock ended Thursday at €679.10. On a monthly basis that represents a 76.9% gain in euro terms, and year?to?date the advance stands at 152.5%.

Bank of America recently doubled down on the thesis, lifting its price target from $500 to $950 on May 13 while keeping a buy rating. Analysts there now peg the total addressable market for AI data centers at $1.7 trillion by 2030. At the heart of the call is High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), a specialised chip that every modern AI accelerator requires. The bank expects the HBM market alone to reach $168 billion by the end of the decade, with memory content per AI chip more than doubling over that period.

Record numbers and an aggressive roadmap

Micron’s own numbers give the bullish story plenty of ammunition. In the fiscal second quarter, revenue exploded 196% year?on?year to $23.86 billion. Adjusted gross margin reached 74.9%, and management is guiding for margins close to 81% in the current quarter, with revenue forecast at $33.5 billion. That kind of pricing power — once unthinkable for a memory maker — is underpinned by a supply crunch that shows no signs of easing.

The company’s HBM capacity is sold out through the end of 2026, and meaningful new output from wafer fabs in Idaho and Singapore won’t hit the market before mid?2027. Micron plans to spend more than $25 billion in capital expenditure in fiscal 2026 alone, most of it on clean rooms. But until those greenfield facilities come online, the supply?demand balance remains firmly in the manufacturer’s favour. Market observers expect DRAM and NAND pricing power to stay with producers into 2028.

Micron is already advancing the technology curve to lock in that advantage. The company has begun sampling a new 256?gigabyte DDR5 server module built on its 1?gamma process, capable of data transfer speeds up to 9,200 megatransfers per second. A single module of that size cuts power consumption by more than 40% compared with two smaller alternatives, a critical efficiency gain for energy?hungry AI data centres. Separately, Micron introduced a 245?terabyte SSD, the 6600 ION, designed for the massive data sets used in training large language models.

Long?term contracts and a higher dividend

The shift from cyclical to strategic is also visible in Micron’s commercial relationships. The company recently signed its first five?year strategic customer agreement, a type of long?term commitment that was rare in the industry’s boom?bust past. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra summed up the transformation by noting that artificial intelligence has made memory “a defining strategic asset.”

On the capital?allocation front, the board approved a 30% increase in the quarterly dividend, lifting it to $0.15 per share. While the payout remains a rounding error next to the company’s market value — now north of $900 billion — the move signals growing confidence in cash?flow durability.

That confidence is not yet universal. The stock’s relative strength index stands at 77, a technical reading that suggests the rally has become overheated. And while Bank of America’s $950 target provides a near?term anchor, the biggest risk is that the scarcity narrative fades before new capacity arrives. For now, Micron’s HBM is all but spoken for through 2026, and the institutional money is following the same playbook as the hedge funds that piled into other AI bottlenecks. The question is not whether the cycle has changed — it’s how long the new logic holds.