Micron has joined the multi-trillion dollar valuation club, but according to multiple metrics, Micron is the black sheep of it all. While giants like Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple reached the $1 trillion mark with the backing of promoter CEOs and ubiquitous brand recognition, Micron’s rise as a parts maker owes much to its position in the rapidly changing technology supply chain amidst the explosive artificial intelligence boom. Micron isn’t the only company rising. South Korean memory chip makers SK Hynix and Samsung have also recently been valued at trillions of dollars as the overall importance of the sector grows. As more sophisticated artificial intelligence gains a commercial foothold, demand for memory shows little sign of slowing down. Micron is committed to maximizing its strategic position in the AI value chain across memory products, including DRAM, NAND, and high bandwidth. “Quarterly sales nearly tripled compared to a year ago, and sales in DRAM, NAND, HBM and each business unit reached new highs,” Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mehrotra said in the company’s latest earnings call in March, predicting capital spending for fiscal 2026 would exceed $25 billion. “Micron is working to address an unprecedented gap between supply and demand.” “Unassuming” CEO Consumer electronics maker Apple has long been synonymous with founder Steve Jobs, who has been the subject of biographies and Hollywood biopics. Current CEO Tim Cook is similarly a staple of pop culture. This also applies to multitrillion-dollar CEOs, including Nvidia founder Jensen Huang and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Microsoft has produced several famous executives such as Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella, while Alphabet has produced the likes of Larry Page and Sundar Pichai. However, Micron has had four CEOs since its founding in 1978, none of them famous. CNBC’s Jim Cramer called Mehrotra “low-key.” “(Micron) is run by the speculative Sanjay Mehrotra, who is modest and unassuming. I know I’ve been promoting Micron much more than he has been talking about its prospects,” Kramer said on Tuesday’s show. Once a “commodity,” but still a component Unlike Apple’s iPhone, Google’s search results, and Amazon’s personalized shopping recommendations, Micron’s memory chips are not consumer products, but are back-end hardware components. Until recently, they were even considered commodities like soybeans and copper cathodes. “This is what memory used to be… Its role was small, it was a commodity. It’s no longer a commodity,” Gil Luria, attorney general Davidson’s director of technology investigations, told CNBC on Tuesday. While memory has become an increasingly hot product in the AI era, with Nvidia and Micron co-designing chips, it remains essentially a component of infrastructure that users don’t interact with directly. Micron’s rise to the $1 trillion level speaks to the growing power of the sector and the company itself. “Memory prices are undergoing their steepest upcycle in a decade,” Melius Research’s Ben Reitzes wrote in April. “[It’s]changing at a pace the industry hasn’t seen in years.” Traditionally more volatile Commodity prices are generally more volatile than stock prices because of their lower position in global value chains and are more sensitive to fundamental factors such as supply and demand. “When memory was a commodity, it was on the spot market on an invoice basis. Now we have long-term contracts with hyperscalers,” said Luria of Attorney Davidson. “Memory companies are transforming into much less cyclical companies.”Despite these changes, Micron’s share price relative to the broader market, a measure known as beta, is lower than fellow chipmaker Nvidia, but still higher than its multitrillion-dollar peers. Micron’s 5-year raw beta is 1.81. According to FactSet, NVIDIA’s five-year monthly beta is 2.18, compared to Microsoft’s 1.07 and Alphabet’s 1.26. Low price-to-earnings ratio Micron stands out among mega-cap companies in terms of price-to-earnings ratio. While many trillion-dollar tech companies have P/E ratios of more than 20 times, Micron’s P/E ratio is less than half that. The apparent undervaluation of the stock is a frequent subject of commentary. Some have cautioned against buying because of this, as cyclical demand for memory could ultimately reduce sales, while others have noted the overall retail appeal. “Micron has been a hot commodity in retailers for the past few months,” Vanda analyst Viraj Patel told CNBC in early May. “Micron probably has a much larger share of retail flow and attention.” An older but fast-growing company, Micron has been around since 1978, so it took nearly 50 years to reach a market capitalization of $1 trillion. This compares to Google’s 22 years and Amazon’s 24 years since its founding. Although the road to $1 trillion is a long one, the company’s growth from a $500 billion market cap to $1 trillion happened in the blink of an eye. It took about a month and a half for that to happen. In comparison, Nvidia takes about 500 business days, Amazon takes about 640 business days, Alphabet takes just over 1,000 business days, and Apple takes just over 1,600 business days. CNBC’s Deena Zaidi and Nick Wells contributed reporting.
