What happened: Micron (MU) stock extended gains on Wednesday after an epic run, putting it on track for a fourth consecutive record close.
What’s behind the move: Shares of the memory maker rose 3% amid continued momentum, following a surge that pushed the company’s valuation above $700 billion.
AMD’s (AMD) quarterly results and outlook point to accelerating demand for its chips, which bodes well for high-bandwidth memory makers like Micron.
On Tuesday, the company said it began shipping its largest commercially available SSD, which allows companies to store far more data in less space, using up to 82% fewer racks than hard drives.
Fitch also upgraded the memory chipmaker’s credit rating from BBB to BBB+ and assigned it a stable outlook.
The credit rating agency said Micron is benefiting from surging AI-driven demand for memory products. That demand “is driving materially improved profitability and near-term revenue visibility, with customers including hyperscalers increasingly seeking long-term supply agreements to secure dedicated capacity.”
What else you should know: Shares of Micron, which manufactures memory chips used in everything from smartphones to AI servers, have soared this year, helping drive the semiconductor rally as enterprise spending on infrastructure takes center stage.
Memory and storage, historically highly cyclical, are entering a structurally different cycle driven by the rise of inference and agentic AI, shifting demand from one-time model training to continuous iteration and real-time output generation.
“This cycle is obviously significantly different from past cycles,” John Vinh of Keybank Capital Markets told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.
“Now you’ve got a driver in AI that’s going to sustain the cycle for much longer,” he added.
During their earnings calls last week, Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), and Apple (AAPL) all flagged rising memory costs.
Micron stock is up 122% year to date and 690% over the past year.
Ines Ferre is a senior business reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X at @ines_ferre.
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