Shares of Micron Technology climbed sharply at the start of the week as investors weighed bullish analyst commentary against reports of intensifying competition in the artificial intelligence memory market.
Micron stock rose 5.1% on Monday and gained another 6.4% on Tuesday to trade at $414.25.
The stock remains about 5.2% below its all-time closing high of $437.80 recorded on February 2.
The advance comes ahead of Micron’s fiscal second-quarter earnings report, with investors closely watching how long the surge in demand for memory chips driven by artificial intelligence will continue.
Analysts lift targets on Micron stock
Several Wall Street firms reiterated bullish views on Micron, arguing that the memory demand cycle still has room to run.
Analysts at Citi reaffirmed a Buy rating and increased their price target on Micron to $430 from $385, citing strong demand from hyperscale data centre operators.
Citi analyst Atif Malik said supply-chain checks point to rising memory costs playing a significant role in increased capital spending by large cloud companies.
“Our supply chain discussions and analysis point to the majority of the 2026 hyperscale capex revision to be driven by higher memory costs,” Malik wrote in a research note on Monday.
Citi expects dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, prices to surge 171% in 2026 as demand from artificial intelligence infrastructure continues to accelerate.
Other analysts also see strong long-term demand for memory products used in AI workloads.
Susquehanna analyst Mehdi Hosseini reiterated a Positive rating on Micron and raised his price target to $525 from $345.
Hosseini said supply and demand could begin to balance out by mid-2027 as additional memory clean-room capacity comes online.
However, increasingly complex artificial intelligence workloads may sustain strong memory demand even as margins begin to narrow.
Aletheia Capital also issued a particularly bullish outlook.
Warren Lau raised his price target to $650, a new Street-high estimate that implies roughly 70% upside from current levels.
Lau increased his earnings forecasts for Micron after pointing to surging demand for high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, used in AI training and inference.
According to Lau, the rise of “agentic AI” applications is also increasing demand for other memory technologies, including server DRAM, SRAM and CXL-based memory systems.
Earnings expectations remain high
Micron is scheduled to release its fiscal second-quarter results on March 18.
Wall Street expects the company to report earnings per share of $8.52 on revenue of $18.85 billion.
Analysts are also anticipating strong pricing momentum in the memory market.
Some forecasts suggest DRAM prices could rise as much as 70% during the quarter, reflecting tight supply and robust demand tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The surge in demand has reportedly pushed customers to secure memory supply through prepayment arrangements, strengthening Micron’s pricing power in the near term.
Nvidia supply reports highlight competitive pressure
Despite the bullish outlook, some concerns remain about Micron’s role in the next generation of AI hardware platforms.
According to Korean media reports, Nvidia plans to use HBM4 memory supplied by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix for the initial rollout of its upcoming Vera Rubin AI platform.
Micron is expected to supply HBM4 chips for Rubin CPX systems designed primarily for inference workloads, rather than the higher-performance training systems expected to debut first.
Allocation and pricing for the memory used in the Rubin platform remain uncertain.
Reports suggest Nvidia is pushing suppliers to deliver memory speeds exceeding 10 gigabits per second, surpassing the current HBM4 specification set by JEDEC.
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