The memory chip crunch is paying off for this U.S. company | TechCrunch

In Brief

The AI boom has fueled dozens of new startups and minted a new class of billionaires. It has also produced a serious shortage of memory chips — a critical component for compute-hungry AI models — which some predict could persist through 2027.

This era of RAMageddon isn’t just a corporate problem. As demand spikes and squeezes supply, prices are rising and trickling down to consumers. Apple CEO Tim Cook warned just a week ago that price increases for its products are unavoidable.

But amid this Mad Max-esque fight for memory chips, some companies are coming out ahead. Micron, the largest U.S. computer-memory chip maker — with a market cap of $1.2 trillion — is one of them. That hasn’t always been the case. The company’s shares were trading around $83 in early 2024 (with a market cap of about $91 billion) and closed today at $1,048.51.

The company reported third-quarter earnings after markets closed Wednesday, and the results sent shares soaring more than 13%. Revenue quadrupled to $41.45 billion compared with the same period a year ago. The company’s profit, meanwhile, rose from $1.88 billion to an incredible $28.2 billion year-over-year.

The Idaho-based company also gave investors a positive outlook, forecasting fourth-quarter revenue of between $49 billion and $51 billion.

The strong results arrive the same week Micron inked a deal to supply AI lab Anthropic with memory and storage chips. Micron also disclosed that it participated in Anthropic’s Series H funding round, though it didn’t disclose how much it invested.

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