The memory chip crunch is paying off for this U.S. company
In Brief The AI boom has fueled dozens of new startups and minted a new class of billionaires. It has also produced a serious shortage
In Brief The AI boom has fueled dozens of new startups and minted a new class of billionaires. It has also produced a serious shortage of memory chips — a critical component for compute-hungry AI models — which some predict could persist through 2027. This era of RAMageddon isn’t just a corporate problem. As demand spikes and squeezes supply, prices are rising and trickling down to consumers.
Apple CEO Tim Cook warned just a week ago that price increases for its products are unavoidable. But amid this Mad Ma esque fight for memory chips, some companies are coming out ahead. Micron, the largest U.S. computer-memory chip maker — with a market cap of $1.2 trillion — is one of them. That hasn’t always been the case. The company’s shares were trading around $83 in early 2024 (with a market cap of about $91 billion) and closed today at $1,048.51.
The company reported third-quarter earnings after markets closed Wednesday, and the results sent shares soaring more than 13%. Revenue quadrupled to $41.45 billion compared with the same period a year ago. The company’s profit, meanwhile, rose from $1.88 billion to an incredible $28.2 billion year-over-year. The Idaho-based company also gave investors a positive outlook, forecasting fourth-quarter revenue of between $49 billion and $51 billion.
The strong results arrive the same week Micron inked a deal to supply AI lab Anthropic with memory and storage chips. Micron also disclosed that it participated in Anthropic’s Series H funding round, though it didn’t disclose how much it invested.
The BriefWire