Sanjay Mehrotra, President and Chief Executive Officer of Micron Technology Inc., attends a groundbreaking ceremony for Micron Technology Inc.’s new semiconductor manufacturing facility in Clay, New York, USA, on Friday, January 16, 2026.
Heather Ainsworth | Bloomberg | Getty Images
micron The company’s stock price will triple in 2025 and is up nearly 62% so far in 2026. Nvidia Artificial intelligence chips will lead to shortages.
The memory shortage driving Micron is bad news for many of its peers, which are facing soaring prices to secure critical components. Among America’s 10 most valuable tech companies, only Micron has gained this year. This increase boosts Micron’s market capitalization to $520 billion; oraclecurrently worth $445 billion.
Micron is scheduled to report second-quarter results after the close of trading on Wednesday, and analysts expect sales to increase 148% from a year ago, according to LSEG. Executives will discuss the results with analysts on a conference call beginning at 4:30 p.m. ET.
The memory chip shortage shows no signs of letting up, as big tech companies spend record amounts of money trying to keep up with the AI race.
“Memory is a key enabler of AI,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in January. “It’s not just like a component in a system, it’s a strategic asset today. So we need it. Just like the brain, we need more memory. We need faster memory.”
Amazon and googlehas been gradually raising its capital spending forecast as it buys large quantities of NVIDIA chips and rents them through cloud services.
Cloud providers require racks full of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin graphics processing units in their data centers, and each system requires large amounts of memory.
The Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 system uses about three times as much dynamic random access memory (DRAM) as the Grace Blackwell GB300 NVL72 rack, RBC analysts wrote in a note Sunday. One Rubin Ultra graphics processing unit has over 3x more terabytes of high-performance HBM4e memory than a single Rubin GPU.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Monday at the company’s GTC conference that he expects orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin GPUs to reach $1 trillion by 2027.
This rush to buy GPUs has boosted Micron, which in December predicted it would run out of high-bandwidth memory in 2026.
Tae-won Chey, chairman of Micron’s rival’s parent company, spoke at Nvidia’s GTC. SK HynixAccording to a report from Bloomberg, the memory shortage will continue for another four to five years.
Analysts surveyed by StreetAccount predict that Micron’s DRAM average selling price will rise nearly 32% from the previous quarter in the second quarter.
For the fiscal third quarter, analysts surveyed by Street Account expect adjusted gross margin to be more than 71% and revenue to be $23.8 billion, an increase of nearly 156%.
Memory for PC
GPU stockpiling is driving up memory prices for other products. Tech industry analysis firm TrendForce said in a February report that contract prices for PC DRAM “rose significantly this quarter.”
RBC analysts wrote that blended DRAM prices will jump 80% to 85% in the first quarter of 2026, according to TrendForce data.
As a result, PC sales may decline.
Industry research firm IDC last week revised down its forecast for PC sales, predicting a decline of 11.3% this year, compared to a 2.4% decline in 2026 that the company announced in November.
IDC also expects smartphone shipments to decline by 12.9% this year.
“Memory shortages will continue until 2027,” IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani said in a statement.
Dell The company has also warned of rising memory costs, with Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clark telling analysts on an earnings call in February that the cost of DRAM has risen five-and-a-half times in the past six months, while long-term storage NAND flash memory has quadrupled.
“We are working with our memory partners to be as flexible and agile as possible,” Clark said. “We’re trying to figure out: How can we minimize complexity? How can we improve the combination? How can we sell what’s coming out? How can we improve the design by incorporating all available parts?”
Micron is taking steps to increase supply, but some of that build-out is still a long way off.
In January, the company held a groundbreaking ceremony in upstate New York at the site where it plans to build up to four manufacturing plants. The following month, it opened an assembly and testing facility in India to process memory wafers into finished products.
WATCH: RBC’s Pajuri at Micron: Prices to remain the same for the rest of the year and next year
