Wall Street has found a new darling in the semiconductor world. Micron Technology, the Boise-based memory chip maker, briefly surpassed the market valuations of both Meta and Tesla on Thursday, riding an AI-driven memory shortage that shows no signs of letting up.
Micron closed Friday with a market cap near $1.27 trillion, nipping at the heels of Meta ($1.39 trillion) and Tesla ($1.42 trillion). The stock has surged over 236% in the past month alone, closing at $1,132 a share — a dizzying climb for a company that traded below $100 for years before mid-2025.
What changed? The AI data center buildout has created a severe shortage of system memory chips, particularly High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). A single AI server consumes magnitudes more memory than a laptop, and demand from Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Google, Meta, and Oracle has sparked what industry watchers call “RAMageddon.” The supply crunch is expected to persist into 2027 and is already driving up consumer electronics prices.
Micron delivered blockbuster third-quarter results last week: revenue quadrupled year-over-year to $41.45 billion, and profits skyrocketed from $1.88 billion to $28.2 billion. The company forecast Q4 revenue between $49 billion and $51 billion.
Wall Street has been hunting for more public AI companies with Nvidia-like potential. Micron has locked in 16 long-term strategic customer agreements, including deals with Nvidia and Anthropic, designed to smooth out the boom-and-bust cycles historically plaguing memory manufacturers. William Blair analyst Sebastien Naji noted that demand growth continues outpacing new cleanroom capacity, suggesting durable earnings growth ahead.
The big question is how long the memory shortage will last — and whether Micron can avoid the supply gluts that have historically punished memory makers. For now, it has Wall Street firmly in its corner.
Source: TechCrunch
