Micron Technology‘s stock has shown strong performance recently, primarily driven by sustained demand for memory from AI applications and positive impacts from Oracle‘s better-than-expected earnings guidance. During Wednesday’s trading session, its stock price rose by as much as 5.2% at one point, eventually closing with a gain of 3.5%.
This upward movement was supported by a bullish report released by analysts at Citigroup. The report indicated that the shortage of memory chip supply is expected to persist until 2026, with DRAM demand growth projected to outpace supply by 1.8 percentage points. Meanwhile, the long-over supplied NAND flash memory market is also anticipated to see demand exceed supply by 4 percentage points. This forecast provides a positive industry outlook for memory manufacturers like Micron.
At the same time, Oracle’s latest financial report revealed a significant 359% increase in its remaining performance obligations, reaching $455 billion, with expectations that cloud infrastructure revenue will grow from the current $18 billion to $144 billion by 2030. This remarkable growth has further bolstered market confidence in the long-term demand for AI-related infrastructure.
Notably, both the Citigroup report and Oracle’s developments highlight that AI inference is emerging as a new driver of memory demand. AI applications are expanding from training to inference and edge devices, fueling demand for products such as general-purpose servers, mobile DRAM, and high-density NAND. Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison also emphasized the vast opportunities in the inference market, stating that Oracle is well-positioned competitively due to its leading role in enterprise data hosting.
Against this backdrop, Micron Technology, with its continuously enhanced technological capabilities in recent years—matching or even surpassing its peers—is at a critical stage of industry development. Although the memory industry remains cyclical and capital-intensive, the sustained demand driven by artificial intelligence is expected to provide stable support for memory pricing and sales in the medium to short term.
