On a Thursday in mid-2025, a company that most consumers associate with the small memory cards once slotted into cameras and ageing smartphones quietly surpassed the market valuations of Meta and Tesla — two of the most recognised brands on the planet. By Friday, Micron Technology had floated back down to a market capitalisation of roughly $1.27 trillion, but the moment had already said something striking about where the technology industry believes its future lies: not in social media feeds or electric vehicles, but in the unglamorous interior of an AI server rack. Micron, headquartered in Boise, Idaho, makes two categories of memory chip — DRAM and NAND flash — along with a specialised variety called High-Bandwidth Memory, or HBM.

It is HBM that has ignited investor excitement. A single AI server requires vastly more memory than an ordinary laptop, and the hyperscalers racing to build data centres — among them Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Oracle — are purchasing memory in quantities that the industry simply cannot yet match. The resulting shortage has been nicknamed "RAMageddon" by analysts, and it is already pushing up the retail prices of consumer electronics from Apple devices to Xbox consoles. The financial consequences for Micron have been extraordinary.

Third-quarter revenue quadrupled year-over-year to $41.45 billion, while net profit leapt from $1.88 billion to $28.2 billion across the same period.

The company forecast fourth-quarter revenue of between $49 billion and $51 billion.