In its fiscal 2026, Micron's revenue grew by 256% to $133.2 billion, with surging prices driven by a memory shortage.
Micron is racing to add manufacturing capacity, accelerating construction on a second Idaho fab and breaking ground on its first New York fab.
Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) just closed out one of the strangest, most extraordinary fiscal years a chipmaker has ever posted. Revenue in its fiscal 2026 hit $133.2 billion, up 256% from the year before, earnings soared almost tenfold from $7.59 per share to $74.33 per share, and the company went from an afterthought in most portfolios to a roughly $1.1 trillion megacap in the space of about 18 months.
I feel like I've spent the entire year checking this ticker, only to see the stock post consistently breathtaking gains. Before getting into what $2,000 invested in it today might look like in 2029, it's worth understanding exactly what this company is up to. Let's get into what's driving these numbers that large, because it isn't hype. It's a genuine, physical shortage of the memory chips that AI data centers need in growing amounts.
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Micron's fiscal fourth-quarter results showed revenue of $54.23 billion, up 31% sequentially and 379% year over year. That marked the company's sixth consecutive quarterly revenue record. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $33.42, up from $3.03 in the prior-year period, and for the fiscal year, gross margin expanded to 81.1%, a 40-percentage-point jump from fiscal 2025. DRAM revenue alone topped $100 billion for the year, with fourth-quarter DRAM sales up 343% from a year earlier. Management is guiding for first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue to land between $60 billion and $63 billion, meaning it expects the boom to keep accelerating.
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This fall, the headline product news centers on HBM4, the latest-generation high-bandwidth memory that sits directly inside AI accelerators. Micron announced what it's calling the industry's first custom HBM4E implementation, developed specifically for Nvidia's (NASDAQ: NVDA) next-generation GPUs and NVLink Fusion platforms. The deal between them locks Micron into Nvidia's roadmap rather than leaving it to compete for generic orders. This is super bullish for Micron and a strong reason the stock has experienced gains of nearly 400% over the last year.
CEO Sanjay Mehrotra described a strong multiyear roadmap for future HBM products, and the company is simultaneously racing to build foundry capacity to keep up: It's pushing construction of a second fab in Idaho and broke ground on its first New York fab in January, part of a manufacturing build-out now backed by more than $6 billion in CHIPS Act funding.
The memory chip business has always been brutally cyclical, and most of Micron's current numbers reflect price growth more than volume growth. DRAM and NAND contract prices have surged dramatically this year as Samsung, SK Hynix (NASDAQ: SKHY), and Micron -- the three largest players in the space by far -- all redirected production capacity toward high-margin HBM instead of ordinary memory, creating a supply squeeze that's pushed prices for all types of memory to levels this industry has never sustained for long.
All three are constructing new fab capacity, but that isn't expected to meaningfully ease the squeeze until 2027 or later. Historically, when that kind of production boost eventually arrives, supply catches up to demand and generally surpasses it, at which point prices fall hard. Whether this cycle breaks that pattern because the new demand driven by the AI trend is structurally different is the real question behind any 2029 prediction.
Micron trades at around $950 a share today, down from an all-time high of $1,213 reached in June. In a bull case, I'd assume AI-driven memory demand stays structurally elevated through 2029, with revenue growing to around $190 billion and the market still willing to pay close to 8 times sales given Micron's locked-in HBM relationships. That implies a market cap near $1.5 trillion and a share price around $1,330, pushing that original $2,000 to roughly $2,690.
In a more conservative, historically grounded case, new supply from Micron's own expanding foundry operation and those of its competitors eventually catches up to demand sometime around 2028, memory prices normalize, and the company's revenue settles back closer to $100 billion with the multiple compressing to a more typical cyclical semiconductor level of around 5 times sales. That implies a market cap near $500 billion and a share price closer to $440, which would leave that initial $2,000 investment worth roughly $890.
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Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Micron Technology and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.