Micron zooms past $700 billion market cap rally in memory stocks

Mikron’s The historical rise continued on Tuesday; Shares of the memory maker rose 11%, pushing the company’s market value above $700 billion for the first time.

The stock is now up 124% this year and nearly 700% in the past 12 months, placing Micron among the 10 most valuable U.S. tech companies.

The demand for memory has also increased as the AI ​​boom has created insatiable demand leading to a global shortage. chip manufacturers Nvidia And Advanced Micro Devices It requires large amounts of memory to power high-performance AI processors. Micron, SK Hynix And SAMSUNG It makes up almost the entire memory market.

sandiskThe maker of solid-state drives based on what is known as NAND memory was also on the rise, rising 12% on Tuesday. The stock is up nearly sixfold this year.

Micron announced Tuesday that it has begun shipping its largest commercially available product solid state drive. Compared to traditional hard disk drives, SSDs allow more memory to be stored with lower power consumption.

“The breakthrough capacity provides data center operators with a critical new tool to improve total cost of ownership at the rack level, especially as power availability becomes a defining constraint for AI infrastructure scale,” Jeremy Werner, senior vice president of Micron’s core data center business, said in the press release.

Memory manufacturers were unable to keep up with demand during the AI ​​craze that began with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Following Micron’s second-quarter earnings report in March, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC that they were only able to meet “50% to two-thirds of the needs” of key customers due to supply shortages.

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Correction: This story has been revised to reflect that Micron’s CEO is Sanjay Mehrotra. In a previous version, his name was misspelled.