Micron Technology reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $54.23 billion on Wednesday, nearly five times the $11.32 billion a year earlier, and told Wall Street the next quarter should be larger still. The scarce input in the AI buildout is no longer only the GPU. It is the memory stacked beside it.
Adjusted earnings were $33.42 a share, against a $31.61 LSEG consensus. Analysts had expected $51.07 billion in sales. Net income rose to $37.7 billion from $3.2 billion. DRAM revenue jumped 343 percent, to $39.8 billion, or 73 percent of the quarter. For the fiscal first quarter, Micron guided to about $61.5 billion in revenue and $38.15 in adjusted earnings per share, plus or minus a dollar, above estimates of $57 billion and $35.40. The stock, up more than 500 percent over the past year, was little changed after hours. The company's market value has topped $1.2 trillion.
Micron is the only U.S. maker of high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM that Nvidia and AMD accelerators need. Chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra said the firm is working with Nvidia on the industry's first custom HBM design and has a "strong roadmap" for future products. It is spending $250 billion on two campuses, including a plant in Clay, New York, and a Boise fab due next year. SK Hynix and Samsung still hold larger HBM shares. The shortage has already lifted prices on consumer machines, including Apple iPads and MacBooks.
The second-order squeeze is downstream. A memory cycle that will not roll over is an inflation story for electronics and a capex story for every lab that has to buy HBM before it can buy more training runs. Gabelli's Hendi Susanto called it another beat-and-raise with no sign of a downturn. That is good for Micron. It is a tax on everyone else in the AI stack, including the households already paying more for a laptop while the 10-year yield sits at a 2007 high.
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