What happened: Micron Technology (MU) stock surged 6% to close at a fresh record on Monday ahead of the memory chipmaker’s highly anticipated earnings release this week. Other chip players also climbed to new highs, including memory and storage maker Sandisk (SNDK).
What’s behind the move: Micron stock jumped after the memory chipmaker announced it signed a memory and storage supply deal with AI developer Anthropic (ANTH.PVT).
“This positions Micron to support Anthropic’s multi-year growth trajectory as the frontier AI lab scales its compute strategy for the long term,” Micron said in a press release on Monday.
Micron has been on a tear ahead of its earnings report due on Wednesday, serving as a bellwether for memory demand in AI inference.
UBS analyst Melissa Weathers recently raised the bank’s price target for Micron to $1,500 per share, as demand for DRAM — the type of memory used for data centers, servers, and smartphones — is “still set to vastly outpace supply growth in the coming years, driven by more memory-intensive AI workloads.”
Micron stock is up more than 300% year to date, hitting record highs repeatedly, alongside SanDisk and storage play Western Digital (WDC).
What else you need to know: Memory has been a major bottleneck in the artificial intelligence trade, with Micron leading the semiconductor complex.
On Monday, peer SK Hynix (000660.KS) surpassed Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) as South Korea’s largest company after raising unit prices amid rising costs due to tighter supply.
Last month, Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), and SK Hynix all made headlines as they reached $1 trillion valuations for the first time.
Ines Ferre is a senior business reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X at @ines_ferre.
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Ines Ferre is a senior business reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X at @ines_ferre.
