Chris Neiger, The Motley Fool
6 min read
Artificial intelligence chatbots and agents are quickly becoming a normal part of many people’s everyday lives, and with their growing usage comes the need for much more AI infrastructure to support their needs for compute power.
Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a “Double Down” signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same “Total Conviction” signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »
And that has spurred a further rush to purchase memory chips for data centers, sending Micron Technology‘s (NASDAQ: MU) sales and earnings soaring and its share price skyrocketing. It is now up by about 1,010% over the past five years.
What the next five years will look like for Micron stock is difficult to predict. Still, given the company’s current position in the memory market and rising demand for memory, its future certainly looks bright. Here’s why.
Micron is in the right place at the right time
One of the key components of AI infrastructure is memory. The quantity of stored data that processors can rapidly access determines how quickly and at what scale AI systems can train and run models. Data centers rely on several types, notably high bandwidth memory (HBM) and conventional dynamic random-access memory (DRAM).
Micron isn’t the No. 1 provider in either of these niches, but it does hold impressive market shares — 18% in HBM and 21% in DRAM, according to Counterpoint Research. Those strong positions have allowed Micron to benefit greatly from the booming memory market. In its fiscal 2026 fourth quarter, which ended Sept. 3, revenue rose 380% year over year to $54.2 billion, and non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) earnings rose by about 1,000% to $33.42 per share.
Micron has seen boom times similar to these before, and that’s what has some investors worried. The memory business has always been highly cyclical, so there’s reason to think that memory demand could taper off soon, sending memory prices falling back toward where they were before the current shortage. That would mean Micron would lose the highly favorable gross margin (nearly 81%) that it currently has.
But recent comments from fellow memory giant SK Hynix (NASDAQ: SKHY) shed some light on just how short on memory tech companies are, and the efforts they are making to try to secure more of it. The company’s management said it has already sold through half of its expected memory production for 2027 and 2028.
