Micron Technology reported a sharply higher fiscal third-quarter revenue on Wednesday, well above year-ago levels, sending shares up as much as 19% in Thursday morning trading before the stock pared gains to around 10%, CNBC’s Sawdah Bhaimiya reported. At the intraday peak, Micron’s market cap briefly pushed above those of Meta and Tesla, placing it among the most valuable U.S. companies. The quarterly print landed well above the LSEG consensus estimate of roughly $36 billion.
The scale of the revenue jump — a more than fourfold increase in a single year — reflects what Micron described as a structural supply imbalance in the memory market. AI data centers run by hyperscalers are absorbing memory at a pace that has squeezed supply available for smartphones, PCs, and other consumer devices, pushing memory prices higher across the board.
Long-Term Deals Lock In $22 Billion in Commitments
Micron’s quarter wasn’t built on spot demand alone. The company disclosed 16 long-term supply agreements covering customers from data centers to automakers, with financial commitments of $22 billion expected from those deals, according to CNBC. RBC Capital Markets analysts, cited in the same report, said approximately 40% of Micron’s revenue will flow through long-term contracts with a minimum price floor built in — a structure they said should help limit margin risk if demand cools within the typical five-year contract window.
RBC reiterated its Outperform rating and raised its price target, with analysts writing that their base case is for the current upcycle to continue through 2027, and that the supply commitment agreements add conviction on sustainability.
For the current quarter, Micron guided revenue substantially higher than the prior-year period, per CNBC.
The $700 Billion Buildout Behind the Print
The demand story runs back to the hyperscalers. Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon have collectively allocated $700 billion to AI data center buildouts, CNBC’s Liz Napolitano reported — and those construction pipelines require dense NAND and DRAM deployments that Micron supplies. NAND, a storage memory format, has seen demand surge as AI workloads scale, tightening industry conditions that Micron says have supported pricing
Capital.com Senior Market Analyst Daniela Hathorn described the results as fresh reassurance that the AI investment cycle remains firmly intact, adding that robust memory demand from data centers and AI infrastructure customers reinforces the view that capital spending on AI is continuously accelerating.
“That has helped lift sentiment across the semiconductor sector after recent weakness in high-growth names, suggesting investors remain willing to look through short-term volatility as long as the earnings outlook continues to justify elevated valuations,” Hathorn said, in a note cited by CNBC.
Sandisk Climbs 12% on the Coattails
The read-through to other memory names was immediate. Sandisk added 12% on Thursday, and Citigroup analyst Asiya Merchant hiked her 12-month price target on the stock significantly — implying 31% upside from Wednesday’s close — maintaining a buy recommendation, CNBC’s Liz Napolitano reported.
“SNDK should continue to be a beneficiary of this structurally favorable environment… serving as a competitive moat, and with increasing mix to data center further benefiting its margins through the longer-term,” Merchant wrote in a note to clients Thursday.
The Citi call sits with the broader consensus: 20 of 23 analysts covering Sandisk rate the stock a buy or strong buy, per LSEG data cited by CNBC. Sandisk’s shares have climbed sharply since the company began trading as an independent public company following its spin-off from Western Digital in early 2025, according to Factset data in the same report — reflecting the significant changes seen across the memory sector during that period.
Chip Stocks Reverse Earlier Week Losses
Micron’s print arrived after a sharp sector selloff earlier in the week that hit Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, per CNBC. Qualcomm, Intel, and AMD all climbed in early Thursday trading before giving back some gains. The MarketWatch characterisation of Micron as one of the world’s most important stocks reflects how far the company’s fortunes have shifted — from a cyclical commodity chipmaker to a core infrastructure supplier for the AI buildout.
That repositioning may influence how some market participants interpret the quarterly results. . When memory was a commodity cycle, a revenue quadrupling would have been met with scepticism about the mean-reversion to come. Micron has stated that its long-term supply agreements with minimum price provisions support its view that the current cycle differs from previous memory cycles. .
The counter to that argument is straightforward: supply eventually responds to price. Memory manufacturing capacity is being expanded across the industry, and if AI capex growth flattens or hyperscalers defer planned data center spending, the same supply imbalance that drove Micron’s print could reverse. Consumer device markets — smartphones and PCs — are already supply-constrained as a side effect of AI demand absorbing capacity, which compresses Micron’s ability to serve those segments. Any demand softening in AI without a corresponding consumer recovery would leave Micron caught between markets.
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