Why Micron Technology’s Stock Just Skyrocketed - The Crypto Connection You Missed

Micron just pulled off a rally that's got traditional investors scratching their heads—while crypto natives nod knowingly.

Memory demand meets AI boom

Semiconductor stocks are heating up as AI workloads demand unprecedented memory capacity. Micron's DRAM and NAND flash technologies sit squarely at the intersection of this convergence—feeding the beasts of machine learning and high-performance computing.

Crypto's hidden infrastructure play

While Wall Street analysts babble about traditional metrics, they're missing the blockchain angle. Data centers processing cryptocurrency transactions and supporting decentralized networks need massive memory bandwidth. Micron's chips are quietly powering the infrastructure behind your favorite altcoins.

The institutional FOMO is real

Hedge funds and asset managers—late as always—are finally realizing that you can't run AI or blockchain applications on wishful thinking. It takes physical hardware, and Micron's riding that wave straight to the bank. Another case of traditional finance playing catch-up with technological reality.

Undersupply of memory chips to continue

Yesterday, sell-side analysts atissued a positive note on Micron, reiterating its buy rating and saying the memory industry is likely to be in undersupply through 2026. The analysts believe that DRAM's demand growth will outstrip supply growth by 1.8 percentage points. In a surprise note, Citi expects even NAND flash, which has suffered from oversupply in recent years since the pandemic, to see demand outstrip supply by four percentage points.

Even after yesterday's rally, Micron was rising again today on the back of Oracle's blowout backlog figure disclosed last night. Oracle said on its earnings release that its remaining performance obligations (RPO) increased a stunning 359% to $455 billion and that it expects its cloud infrastructure revenue to appreciate from $18 billion this year to $144 billion by 2030.

The analyst note and Oracle's earnings are somewhat connected. In the Citi note, the analyst noted artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing will expand memory demand from high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for training to a variety of DRAM and NAND chips at the edge. The note said, "AI demand shifting from AI training to AI Inferencing and edge AI devices will drive memory demand for general server & mobile DRAM as well as high bandwidth & high-density NAND such as QLC-based eSSD."

Then, on Oracle's call with analysts last night, Chairman Larry Ellison also highlighted inferencing as a huge opportunity:

AI inferencing, that will change everything. Oracle is aggressively pursuing the AI -- and we're not doing badly in the AI training market, by the way. But inferencing is bigger. Oracle is aggressively pursuing the inferencing market as well as the AI training market. We think we are in a pretty good position to be a winner in the inferencing market because Oracle is by far the world's largest custodian of high-value private enterprise data.

Image source: Getty Images.

Micron is in a good spot

Micron has gotten its technology on par or better with memory peers over the last decade, just in time for the AI revolution. Although the memory business has traditionally been capital intensive and highly cyclical, as long as AI is leading to insatiable demand, it should bode well for memory pricing and volumes in the medium term.