The AI growth has fueled dozens of latest startups and minted a brand new class of billionaires. It has additionally produced a severe scarcity of reminiscence chips — a vital element for compute-hungry AI fashions — which some predict may persist through 2027.
This period of RAMageddon isn’t only a company downside. As demand spikes and squeezes provide, costs are rising and trickling all the way down to customers. Apple CEO Tim Cook dinner warned only a week in the past that value will increase for its merchandise are unavoidable.
However amid this Mad Max-esque battle for reminiscence chips, some corporations are popping out forward. Micron, the most important U.S. computer-memory chip maker — with a market cap of $1.2 trillion — is considered one of them. That hasn’t all the time been the case. The corporate’s shares have been buying and selling round $83 in early 2024 (with a market cap of about $91 billion) and closed right now at $1,048.51.
The corporate reported third-quarter earnings after markets closed Wednesday, and the outcomes despatched shares hovering greater than 13%. Income quadrupled to $41.45 billion in contrast with the identical interval a yr in the past. The corporate’s revenue, in the meantime, rose from $1.88 billion to an unimaginable $28.2 billion year-over-year.
The Idaho-based firm additionally gave buyers a constructive outlook, forecasting fourth-quarter income of between $49 billion and $51 billion.
The sturdy outcomes arrive the identical week Micron inked a deal to provide AI lab Anthropic with reminiscence and storage chips. Micron additionally disclosed that it participated in Anthropic’s Collection H funding spherical, although it didn’t disclose how a lot it invested.
