Micron surges 38 per cent in a week on AI memory demand

Micron Technology shares surged 38 per cent over five consecutive trading sessions to close at a record $746.81 on Friday, pushing the Boise, Idaho chipmaker’s market capitalisation past $840bn. Data centre operators are racing to secure high-bandwidth memory for artificial intelligence workloads.

The rally began on 1 May and accelerated through the week. Shares jumped 11 per cent on 6 May after Micron announced the 6600 ION, a 245-terabyte solid-state drive the company called the highest-capacity commercially available SSD. The same day, research firm IDC published a forecast projecting that industry DRAM revenues could nearly triple to $418.6bn, which the report said would break the memory industry’s historical boom-and-bust cycle.

Micron’s high-bandwidth memory capacity is sold out for the whole of calendar year 2026. The company has locked in future shipments and pricing under long-term agreements. The supply squeeze has let Micron and rival SanDisk raise prices sharply on critical memory products, fuelling gross margins, according to Zacks Investment Research. Micron’s shares have gained 777 per cent over the trailing 52 weeks and 69.6 per cent in the past 20 trading days. Daily turnover hit $46.36bn on Friday, the highest of any US-listed stock, according to TradingKey.

The rally is part of a broader surge in AI-linked semiconductor stocks. TSMC reported a 17.5 per cent jump in April sales on sustained AI chip demand. South Korea’s SK Hynix, Micron’s main competitor in HBM, is riding the same demand wave. Nvidia and other AI accelerator makers are consuming every available unit of advanced memory.

The memory supply shortage has become structural. Both Micron and SK Hynix are operating at full HBM capacity and new fabrication lines take years to build. IDC analysts argue the traditional memory cycle of oversupply followed by price collapse may not repeat. The forecast of DRAM revenues reaching $418.6bn implies a market roughly three times the size of the last peak. AI training and inference workloads require far more memory per server than conventional cloud computing.

Despite the run, Micron trades at a forward price-to-earnings multiple of 8 to 12 times peak earnings, against 30 to 40 times for Nvidia, according to AOL Finance. Mizuho analysts put the stock on their list of the 10 best American tech stocks to buy in late April, citing growing memory demand. The valuation debate cuts both ways. Trefis maintained a price target of $353, which implies more than 50 per cent downside from current levels. TradingKey noted insider selling and technical indicators that point to a possible correction. The company’s 20-day realised volatility has climbed to 62.9 per cent on an annualised basis, above the one-year norm of 59.6 per cent.

Micron’s next earnings report, due 1 July, will test whether AI-driven memory demand can sustain the valuation. With HBM capacity sold out through 2026 and IDC forecasting a structural break from historical memory-industry cycles, the earnings print will show whether the rally has further to run or the stock has already priced in a level of AI demand that has not yet materialised.