Micron is making a fortune from the memory crisis
Micron follows Nvidia into the club of AI shovel sellers. More memory manufacturers are already lining up.
(Image: heise medien)
Micron generated a good 13.6 billion US dollars in revenue from September to the end of November. This is the second consecutive company record. By early 2025, the company would have been the world's highest-revenue memory manufacturer, ahead of the South Korean global market leaders SK Hynix and Samsung.
Compared to the previous quarter, Micron grew by 21 percent and by 57 percent compared to the same period last year. A good 5.2 billion dollars remain as net profit. That's 64 percent more than in the previous quarter.
Price increase for RAM
The significantly increased profit comes primarily from price increases for SDRAM, which is used, for example, as DDR5 RAM in servers, PCs, and notebooks, or as High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) on AI accelerators. According to Micron, the average price has increased by 20 percent, while the manufacturer has delivered only insignificantly more memory modules. This is also reflected in the gross margin: it increased from just under 45 to 56 percent – including NAND flash memory with a lower margin.
Each division has grown considerably: cloud (memory for hyperscalers, including HBM), "Core" data centers (normal servers), mobile + client, and automotive + embedded (see table). Micron is not abandoning its retail brand Crucial, not because desktop PCs and notebooks are performing poorly, but because memory for data centers is simply more lucrative.
Micron expects much more growth
The outlook for the current fiscal quarter, from December to the end of February, is almost obscene: Micron expects revenue of 18.7 billion dollars in the middle, with a gross margin of 67 percent. Since memory traditionally has a rather low margin, this figure is enormous. It is almost on par with Nvidia's 73.4 percent.
Assuming global purchasing behavior does not change significantly, the market is likely to remain tight: Micron expects to increase production of SDRAM and NAND flash memory chips by only around 20 percent in the calendar year 2026.
Speaking of NAND flash, prices are rising more slowly there, primarily because hard disk drives (HDDs) for data centers are scarce. Corresponding memory modules recently accounted for 20 percent of Micron's revenue (SDRAM: 79 percent, niche products like NOR flash one percent). The volume of NAND flash memory sold recently grew in the “mid-to-high single-digit percentage range,” with average prices rising by around 15 percent (“mid-teens”).
Micron's stock shot up 10 percent after the release of its business report but is still below its level from the beginning of the week. The two even larger memory manufacturers, SK Hynix and Samsung, are expected to release their next business reports at the end of January 2026. We expect similar revenue increases from them as from Micron.
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(mma)
