HOME / BUSINESS / BOISE, IDAHO
Micron Smashes Wall Street Targets as AI's Hunger for Memory Chips Keeps Growing
The chipmaker posted 93% revenue growth and guided even higher for next quarter, with data centers now driving 40% of its sales.
Micron Technology just posted one of the strongest earnings reports of the AI boom so far — and told Wall Street the good times aren't slowing down.
The memory-chip maker reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $11.3 billion, topping analyst expectations of roughly $11.15 billion, with adjusted earnings per share of $3.03 against a projected $2.84. Both figures beat not just Wall Street's forecasts but Micron's own previously boosted guidance from earlier this year.
The engine behind the beat is unmistakable: artificial intelligence. Data centers accounted for 40% of Micron's total revenue for the quarter, and the company's data-center SSD sales topped $1 billion for the first time ever in a single quarter. Overall revenue grew 93% year-over-year, driven heavily by demand for high-bandwidth memory — the specialized chips that feed data into AI processors fast enough to keep up with the models running on them.
Guidance Tops Expectations Too
Micron didn't just beat the quarter that already happened — it raised the bar for the one ahead. The company guided for fiscal first-quarter revenue between $12.2 billion and $12.8 billion, well above the $11.9 billion Wall Street had expected, with adjusted earnings per share guided between $3.60 and $3.90, far ahead of the $3.05 analysts had projected.
The results reinforce a theme that has defined the chip sector for the past two years: companies positioned to supply the physical infrastructure behind AI — memory, storage and high-bandwidth connections — have seen demand outstrip even bullish expectations, as hyperscale cloud companies keep expanding data-center capacity to train and run ever-larger AI models.
Micron's own investor relations materials point to high-bandwidth memory as a long-term growth priority, and Wednesday's numbers suggest that bet is paying off faster than even the company anticipated a few months ago. For now, Micron's forecast gives investors another data point suggesting the AI infrastructure buildout still has room to run — even as questions persist elsewhere in the market about how long that spending can continue to accelerate.