Catenaa, Thursday, June 25, 2026- Micron stock surged over 16% on Thursday as the company’s profits and sales outlook gave relief to AI costs concerned investors.
Revenue hit $41.5 billion, well above expectations. Adjusted earnings came in at $25.11 per share. Gross margin reached 84.9%, topping estimates and more than doubling from a year ago.
Revenue will be approximately $50 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter, which runs through August, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
Analysts estimated $43.2 billion on average. Excluding some items, profit will be about $31 a share, compared with a projection of $25.31.
Micron has also secured 16 strategic customer agreements, which average three years in length. That suggests the company can mitigate the boom-and-bust cycles that have plagued the memory chip industry, said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jake Silverman.
Micron said the 16 deals include take-or-pay commitments, meaning customers commit to buying set volumes or paying anyway, and typically run for several years.
Fourteen of them represent about $100 billion of minimum contracted revenue over the remaining term, with $22 billion of cash deposits and related commitments.
Micron and SK Hynix had been two of the cleanest ways to trade the AI memory boom this year, both crushing the broader chip index before this week’s sell-off.
But on Tuesday, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index had its second-worst day of the past year, while Micron had its worst day since the depths of the “Liberation Day” sell-off in April 2025.
Gross margin shows how much of each sales dollar Micron keeps after making its chips. Micron is now keeping more of each sales dollar than at any point in data going back to 1990.
The company expects that figure to rise again this quarter, to about 86%.
That does not look like a memory market cracking. It looks like one that’s still stretched by AI demand.
AI chips need memory that’s nearby, fast, and supplied in huge quantities. Micron said AI system performance depends on memory performance and capacity, turning memory into a strategic asset rather than a commodity afterthought.
For investors, the lesson is that AI customers are treating memory like a bottleneck they cannot afford to leave to chance.
