GoKawiilSanjay Mehrotra, president and chief executive officer of Micron Technology Inc., during a groundbreaking ceremony for the new Micron Technology Inc. semiconductor manufacturing facility in Clay, New York, US, on Friday, Jan. 16, 2026.
Micron saw its stock triple in 2025, and it's up nearly 62% so far in 2026, as heavy demand for memory-rich Nvidia artificial intelligence chips leads to shortages.
The memory crunch that's boosted Micron has been bad news for many of its tech peers, which are dealing with higher prices as they try to secure critical components. Among the 10 most valuable U.S. tech companies, Micron is the only one up this year. The rally has elevated Micron's market cap to $520 billion, passing Oracle , which is now worth $445 billion.
Micron will issue fiscal second-quarter results after the close on Wednesday, with analysts expecting 148% year-over-year revenue growth, according to LSEG. Executives will discuss the results with analysts on a conference call starting at 4:30 p.m. ET.
The memory chip shortage is showing no sign of letting up, as the tech industry's biggest names spend record amounts to keep up in the AI race.
"Memory is a key enabler of AI," Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC's Sara Eisen in January. "It is a strategic asset today, not like just a component in the system. And so we need it. Just like your brain, you need more memory. You need faster memory."
Amazon and Google , which buy large quantities of Nvidia chips and rent them out through cloud services, have been ratcheting up their forecasts for capital expenditures.
Cloud providers need racks full of Nvidia's Vera Rubin graphics processing units in their data centers, and each system requires large amounts of memory.