The AI boom has inspired dozens of startups and created a new class of billionaires. There is also a severe shortage of memory chips, a critical component for compute-intensive AI models, which some predict could last until 2027.
This era of Ramageddon is not just a problem for companies. When demand surges and supply is squeezed, prices rise, which trickles down to consumers. Just a week ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook warned that price increases for the company’s products were inevitable.
However, in this “Mad Max”-like battle for memory chips, a few companies are starting to take the lead. Micron, the largest computer memory chip maker in the United States with a market capitalization of $1.2 trillion, is one of them. It wasn’t always like that. The company’s stock was trading around $83 at the beginning of 2024 (with a market cap of about $91 billion), and today’s closing price was $1,048.51.
The company announced its third-quarter results after the market closed on Wednesday, and its stock price soared more than 13% on the results. Sales increased four times compared to the same period last year to $41.45 billion. Meanwhile, the company’s profit increased to a staggering $28.2 billion from $1.88 billion year-over-year.
The Idaho-based company also gave investors a positive outlook, predicting fourth-quarter sales of $49 billion to $51 billion.
The positive results were announced the same week that Micron signed a deal to supply memory and storage chips to AI lab Anthropic. Micron also revealed that it participated in Anthropic’s Series H funding round, but did not disclose the amount invested.
