Micron Surges 6% as Intel CEO Warns Memory Prices Have Risen More Than 500%

Micron Technology shares jumped roughly 5 to 6 percent on Thursday after Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan publicly warned that memory prices have surged more than 500 percent and that businesses "cannot get enough memory," a direct endorsement of the supply-demand imbalance that underpins Micron's pricing power. SK Hynix climbed about 5 percent and Intel rose approximately 8 percent on the same session, partly aided by renewed talks around an Ohio memory-chip facility, with the broad chip sector staging a sharp recovery from a selloff earlier in the week driven by easing oil prices and declining Treasury yields.

The rally coincided with Micron officially opening its $2.75 billion assembly and test facility in India, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra saying the plant is on track to scale chip production to hundreds of millions of units beginning next year. The India investment is part of Micron's broader effort to diversify its manufacturing footprint as AI-driven memory demand accelerates.

With the company's fiscal fourth-quarter earnings scheduled for September 30, analysts are projecting earnings of roughly $31 per share compared to approximately $3 per share in the same quarter a year earlier, a near tenfold increase that reflects the explosion in AI-related memory demand. Longer-term contracts now cover 20 percent of Micron's DRAM output and one-third of its NAND volume through 2030, backed by $22 billion in financial commitments, and the company holds $24.43 billion in net cash. Micron is the only major American supplier of both DRAM and High Bandwidth Memory, a position analysts say is central to its role as a primary beneficiary of AI infrastructure buildout.

Separately, Micron's Taiwan workforce is pressing for higher compensation, with workers saying a bonus package of 68 monthly salaries is insufficient, a sign of competitive pressure on talent costs. That pressure extends across the industry: a CNBC report flagged a projected U.S. skilled-worker shortage of up to 157,000 in chip manufacturing by 2030, with companies including Micron hiring aggressively in Asia, where worker bonuses can exceed $500,000.