Wall Street piled back into memory chip stocks Monday morning, with Micron Technology shares jumping as much as 7% in premarket trading to roughly $1,007 a share — breaking back above the psychological $1,000 mark for the first time since July 23 — while SanDisk pushed toward the $1,700 range and South Korea's SK Hynix gained more than 4%, according to TradingKey's market analysis. Micron has now rallied more than 25% since bottoming near $800 in early August.

The trigger is a memory chip shortage that shows no sign of easing. Chipmakers have been shifting factory capacity away from ordinary computer memory and toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized chips that feed AI data centers — and investors are wagering that squeeze is about to get more profitable, not less. Micron says its HBM capacity is already fully booked through 2027, a backlog that has let it push through repeated price hikes on standard DDR5 and LPDDR5X chips even as demand for those parts keeps climbing.

Wall Street keeps hiking targets

The rally accelerated after SanDisk's August 13 investor day, where executives guided to gross margins as high as 80% and touted a contract backlog north of $94 billion. Analysts responded fast: RBC Capital lifted its SanDisk price target to $1,600 from $1,300 on August 14, while Wells Fargo raised its own target to roughly $1,550-$1,620, according to RBC's note reported by Investing.com. The bank pointed to fixed-price supply guarantees from three U.S. hyperscalers underpinning the company's outlook through fiscal 2028.

RBC's note credited the surge to pricing "supported by financial guarantees from three U.S. hyperscalers," with NAND industry supply and demand not expected to fully rebalance until the second half of 2027.

SanDisk stock has now returned more than 3,000% over the past twelve months, per the RBC note — an eye-popping figure even by AI-boom standards, and one that has traders debating whether a stock split is next. Some analyst targets on the Street now stretch as high as $2,000 to $2,900 a share.

The flip side of the rally is showing up at the checkout counter. The same shortage minting fortunes for chipmakers has sent consumer memory prices spiraling: spot pricing on 16Gb DDR5 chips jumped nearly 300% between September and December of last year, and a standard 32GB DDR5 desktop memory kit that cost under $90 has ballooned to roughly $529, according to industry pricing trackers. Contract DRAM prices climbed another 90% to 95% quarter-over-quarter in early 2026, and supply partners have reportedly warned customers to brace for further monthly increases through the rest of the year. Some chip-industry forecasters now say conditions won't normalize before 2028.

For now, that pain for PC builders and gadget buyers is translating directly into gains for chipmaker shareholders. Over 80% of analysts covering Micron rate it a buy, and the stock's next test is whether it can hold the $1,000 level and push toward its June all-time high of $1,255 — or whether Monday's premarket pop fades once the opening bell actually rings.