Why Did Micron Stock Drop Today?
Key Points
A key technology development at Western Digital may be weighing on Micron shares today.
Separately, Seagate confirms that demand for SSDs remains robust.
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Micron (NASDAQ: MU) stock fell 4.2% through noon ET Monday on some potentially worrisome news from hard disk drive specialist Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) -- and an unrelated announcement from Seagate Technology (NASDAQ: STX), which makes both HDDs and also solid-state drives, as Micron does.
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Image source: Micron.
Western Digital news
Let's start with the WD news. In a press release this morning, Western Digital said it is in the process of qualifying "high-capacity Ultrastar UltraSMR hard disk drives" for sale. As WD sees it, AI is steadily moving to a world in which "compute-centric deployments," where large language models (LLMs) are first trained, then used to answer questions, become less important than remembering all the answers that have been given to all those questions.
In this brave new world, "durability and security" of data become more important than rapid data transfer, and hard disk drives become more useful (and cheaper) than solid-state drives. This would appear to shift the advantage in memory formats from SSD to HDD -- and from Micron to Western Digital.
What's important here is that Western Digital is talking about how it sees things playing out in the future, however... not necessarily how things stand today, or even over the next several years.
Seagate Technology news
Entirely separately today, TheFly.com reports on comments from Seagate CEO Dave Mosely, to the effect that Seagate's worried that (1) it doesn't have enough manufacturing capacity to build all the SSDs its customers want, but also (2) doesn't want to build too many new factories to meet this demand, for fear of creating overcapacity that will wreck the cyclical semiconductors market.
Strong demand for SSDs using NAND and DRAM, though? A decision not to build up excess capacity? Both of those sound like positive developments for memory prices, though -- and for Micron stock, too.
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Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Micron Technology and Western Digital. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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