Why Micron Stock Skyrocketed Today: The Crypto Connection You Missed
Micron just pulled off a stunner—shares surged as crypto miners scrambled for their high-performance memory chips.
### The Memory Gold Rush
Demand exploded overnight. Not from gamers or data centers, but from crypto farms upgrading rigs for the next bull run. Micron’s DRAM became the unexpected darling of the mining world.
### Numbers Don’t Lie
Order volumes tripled in 48 hours. Spot prices for certain modules jumped 20%—miners paying premiums without blinking. Wall Street analysts missed it entirely, too busy staring at traditional metrics.
### The Ironic Twist
While suits debated P/E ratios, crypto degens—armed with leverage and memes—spotted the play first. Another reminder: in modern markets, the smart money isn’t always wearing a tie.
Micron’s pop? Just crypto doing what it does best—making conventional finance look late to the party again.
Image source: Getty Images.
What Citi says about Micron stock
Most analysts predict Micron will report $2.85 per share when its news comes out Sept. 23, and Citi's Danely agrees the company will be "in line" with that estimate. What has Danely feeling really optimistic about Micron, though, is the potential for management to give strong guidance on top of its Q4 earnings.
DRAM and NAND sales and prices could both be very good heading into fiscal 2026, argues the analyst, as "the continued memory upturn is being driven by limited production and better-than-expected demand, particularly from the data center end market." (Translation: Demand for artificial intelligence capacity is driving Micron's business.)
Danely predicts that by 2029, fully 34% of all NAND memory chips will be used for AI applications, adding $29 billion worth of NAND sales globally.
Is Micron stock a buy?
Danely may be right. Most analysts following Micron stock predict the company could earn $10 a share in 2029. What worries me, though, is that even if they're right, it means Micron stock already costs more than 15x earnings that it might (or might not) earn four years from now.
Investors are giving Micron credit for earnings it hasn't actually earned yet. Meanwhile, Micron's free cash FLOW is less than one-third of reported income, and the stock costs 82x FCF already today. That's more than I want to pay, and Micron remains a sell for me.
