Micron passed the test.
After fears that a less-than-stellar report from the memory-chip maker could further derail the AI trade after Tuesday’s bruising sell-off, Micron delivered on all fronts.
Shares of the company surged 14% in after-hours trading after it crushed revenue estimates for its fiscal third quarter. Revenue came in at $41.46 billion compared to expectations for $35.7 billion. Earnings per share were $25.11 versus estimates of $20.49.
More importantly for investors, the good times are likely to keep coming. Micron said that revenue for the current quarter would be about $50 billion, blowing past Wall Street’s estimates of $43.2 billion.
The memory maker has been one of the market’s hottest stocks this year, up 267% through Wednesday’s close. At the heart of investors’ bullishness is the shortage of memory capacity driven by the next leg of the AI boom and a shift from training, which requires GPUs, to inference, which requires memory chips.
Micron’s peers in the market have also soared this year, with Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate all up triple digits.
“The memory market is at an unprecedented inflexion point, with demand materially outpacing supply,” IDC, a tech market intelligence firm, said in a report at the end of 2025. Since then, the crunch has only continued.
The costs have spiraled so high that other tech titans that rely on the hardware could raise prices. Apple CEO Tim Cook said this month that price hikes from the iPhone maker are “unavoidable” given soaring costs for memory capacity. Cook’s comments sparked a fresh surge in the hottest memory stocks.
