Micron has turned the AI memory squeeze into a money fountain, with profits surging nearly 15-fold.
According to the Financial Times the US chip outfit reported net income of $28.2bn for its fiscal quarter to 28 May, up from $1.9bn a year earlier.
That beat forecasts from the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street by about $4bn, helped by swollen profit margins and rampant demand. The results sent Micron shares up almost 16 per cent in after-hours New York trading.
That pushed its market value to about $1.3tn and clawed back losses from a cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street sell-off earlier in the week. Nasdaq 100 futures pointed to a 1.7 per cent rise on Thursday.
In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped more than four per cent, while memory chipmaker Kioxia gained another eight per cent. That lifted Kioxia’s rise this year to about 780 per cent, which is daft even by AI bubble standards.
South Korea’s Kospi rose 5.5 per cent, with SK Hynix soaring 11 per cent. SK Hynix said it plans to raise $29bn by listing American depositary receipts on Nasdaq next month.
Micron’s numbers show how a shortage of memory chips used in AI servers has sent prices through the roof.The group said revenue jumped almost 350 per cent to $41.5bn in the May quarter.
It forecast current-quarter sales of about $50bn, well above the $43.7bn analysts expected in a Visible Alpha poll.
The moves followed a rough patch for chipmakers, whose shares have wobbled after leading the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street higher for much of 2026. Memory prices have surged this year as chips have become a bottleneck in building AI data centres.
Processors from Nvidia and AMD need high-bandwidth memory from a handful of suppliers, including Micron, to train and run leading AI models. Micron’s adjusted gross margin soared to 84.9 per cent in the May quarter, compared with 39 per cent a year earlier.
The company expects margins to rise again this quarter to 86 per cent, about one percentage point above analyst forecasts.
Micron executive vice-president of global operations Manish Bhatia said: “Nvidia realised their AI moment a few years ago [with its graphics processing units] . . . now, memory has never been such a valuable part of the computing stack.”
Micron has signed 16 long-term “strategic agreements” with some of its biggest customers. For the first time, those deals include billions of dollars in upfront payments to secure supply. The payments cover AI data centre and consumer electronics for customers.
