Micron The stock rose nearly 8% on Friday as investors looked to buy AI chip supply chain shares after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. announced robust profits Thursday, signaling continued spending on AI infrastructure.
Shares of Micron, a leading maker of memory and storage for artificial intelligence systems, are up more than 250% in the past year as memory experiences a global shortage and sees a surge in demand. Memory is used in AI systems to keep large amounts of data close to the graphics processing unit, or GPU, so that it can run large AI models without slowing down.
“AI demand is accelerating,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC’s Jim Cramer. “It’s real. It’s there, and we need more and more memory to meet this demand. »
Mehrotra said Micron is spending $200 billion to build more manufacturing capacity in the United States, including two manufacturing plants, or fabrication plants, in Idaho and a 600,000-foot facility in Clay, N.Y., where the company began work Friday. Mehrotra said it will take a few years to build the facilities, including clean rooms and production equipment. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick assisted the revolution. Micron announced that it would invest $100 billion in this factory.
He added that Micron is also working to produce more chips at its existing facilities in the near term.
At the start of 2025, Micron expected 10% growth for server memory, but that growth ended up reaching a “high” level by the end of the year. Mehrotra also said the company saw stronger-than-expected growth in PC memory and storage.
“We expect this tension to continue through 2027, so we see sustainable industrial fundamentals for the foreseeable future, driven by demand for AI,” Mehrotra said.
The rush to meet memory demand from companies like Nvidia, Advanced microdevices And Google has led to a shortage, and prices of the essential component are expected to rise about 55% in the first quarter, CNBC previously reported.