Micron Technology has joined the $1 trillion market-cap club, turning a yearlong surge in its shares into one of the most striking valuation moves in the chip business. The stock was up more than 227% in 2026 as of May 28 and more than 867% over the past year, putting the memory maker in rare company on Wall Street.
The rally has been driven by investors racing to price in demand for memory chips used in AI systems, especially the kinds that sit close to powerful processors in data centers. Micron makes DRAM and has been developing high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, both of which are central to the hardware used to train large language models and other compute-heavy AI tools.
That momentum has helped turn Micron’s scale into part of the story. Counterpoint said Micron held 23% of the global DRAM market by revenue at the end of 2025 and 21% of the global HBM market at the end of last year, more than double the 9% share it had at the end of 2024. In March, Micron said it had designed a new HBM model, called HBM4, with 36 gigabytes of 12-Gi memory for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform, a sign the company is pushing deeper into the most coveted part of the memory market.
Sanjay Mehrotra has also been making the case that the AI buildout is changing demand patterns fast. On Micron’s second-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call in March, he said data center demand for DRAM and NAND flash memory was expected to hit 50% of the industry’s total addressable market for the first time this year, while demand across both categories was still being constrained by supply. He also said DRAM shipments were projected to grow in the low-20s percentile this year.
Even with those numbers, the valuation has outrun the usual guardrails. UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri raised his price target on Micron from $535 to $1,625 and said DRAM supply should remain constrained until at least halfway through 2028, while NAND supply should stay tight until the end of 2027. At around $900 a share, Micron is already trading far below that target but still at a level that assumes the AI memory boom lasts long enough to justify the stock’s new stature.
For now, that is the bet investors are making on Micron Technology: that AI demand for memory will keep stretching supply, keep margins elevated and keep the company near the center of the next phase of the chip cycle. The question is not whether memory matters anymore. It is how long the market is willing to pay a trillion-dollar price for that conviction.
