Micron Technology finds itself in an unusual spot. Operationally, the memory chip giant is riding the most powerful wave in its history — yet the stock just gave back nearly 8% in a single week. On Friday, shares closed at €624.00, down 7.69% from the prior week, even as the year-to-date gain stands at a staggering 131.97%.
Bank of America remains undeterred. The firm lifted its price target from $500 to $950 and maintained a Buy rating, betting that the ongoing supply crisis in memory chips will sustain pricing power well beyond typical cycle peaks. The analysts point to the addressable market for AI data centers, which they see swelling to roughly $1.7 trillion by 2030.
That thesis gets reinforced almost daily by product launches and capacity constraints. Micron is now sampling 256-gigabyte DDR5 RDIMM modules capable of up to 9,200 megatransfers per second — a 40% speed improvement over current generation products. Data center operators care about more than raw speed; the new modules also promise better power efficiency, a critical factor in large-scale AI deployments.
Alongside DDR5, Micron has started shipping its 245-terabyte SSD 6600 ION, tailored for AI, cloud and enterprise customers. The drive packs more storage into less physical space while cutting energy consumption. Both products are direct answers to the insatiable appetite of hyperscale customers, which now command nearly all of Micron’s available output.
The pivot away from consumer markets is deliberate. Micron is effectively sacrificing its well-known Crucial brand, redirecting every wafer of production capacity toward high-margin AI and data center clients. That shift has been accelerated by a price shock in the commodity memory market — DRAM and NAND contract prices have surged more than 50% recently, with Gartner forecasting triple-digit percentage increases over the full year. Analysts expect PC and smartphone sales to soften as a result, but for Micron that is a secondary concern.
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What really matters is the supply side, and there is no relief in sight. The company’s new fab in Idaho will not deliver its first wafers until mid-2027; the Singapore facility won’t come online any earlier. Meaningful new capacity won’t reach the market until 2028 at the earliest. Until then, memory makers retain extraordinary pricing leverage.
High Bandwidth Memory, the most coveted product for AI accelerators, is sold out through the end of Micron’s fiscal year. Management sees the total addressable market for HBM expanding from $35 billion in 2025 to more than $100 billion. That tailwind showed up clearly in the latest quarterly results: revenue rocketed 196% year-over-year to $23.86 billion, with adjusted earnings per share of $12.20 blowing past expectations. For the current quarter, guidance calls for revenue of $33.5 billion and adjusted EPS of $19.15.
Short-term noise includes insider sales of roughly $52.4 million — CEO Sanjay Mehrotra executed those through a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan — and a looming strike at competitor Samsung. More than 45,000 workers at Samsung have threatened an 18-day walkout starting May 21, which could further tighten DRAM and HBM supply. Micron itself will appear at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference in Boston on Wednesday, where commentary on HBM capacity and AI demand is expected to provide the next catalyst.
Despite the stock’s pullback, the forward price-to-earnings ratio for fiscal 2027 sits below 10. That is the number bulls repeat most often. A memory cycle driven by structural AI demand rather than consumer gadgetry looks fundamentally different from anything the industry has seen before — and Bank of America’s $950 target is simply the most aggressive expression of that belief.
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