micron Shares rose 6% on Friday as investors looked to buy AI chip supply chain stocks after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported solid results on Thursday and signaled continued AI infrastructure investment.
Shares of Micron, one of the makers of memory and storage for artificial intelligence systems, have risen 52% in the last month as demand surges amid a global memory shortage. AI systems use memory to keep large amounts of data close to the graphics processing unit (GPU), allowing you to run large AI models without slowing down.
“AI-driven demand is accelerating,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC’s Jim Cramer. “It’s real. It’s here. We need more and more memory to handle that demand.”
Mehrotra said Micron is spending $200 billion to expand its manufacturing capacity in the United States, including two factories in Idaho and a 600,000-foot facility in Clay, New York, which broke ground on Friday. Mehrotra said construction of the facility, including clean rooms and production equipment, will take several years. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick also attended the groundbreaking ceremony. Micron announced it would invest $100 billion in the factory.
He added that Micron is also working on producing more chips at its existing facilities in the near term.
At the beginning of 2025, Micron expected server memory growth to be 10%, but by the end of the year it expected it to end up at “10% high.” Mehrotra also said the company’s PC memory and storage grew faster than expected.
“We see this squeeze continuing through 2027, so we expect durable industry fundamentals to be driven by AI demand for the foreseeable future,” Mehrotra said.
A rush to meet the memory demand of companies such as Nvidia, advanced micro device and google There are shortages, and prices for essential components are expected to rise an estimated 55% in the first quarter, CNBC previously reported.
