Micron Surpasses $700 Billion Market Cap as AI Memory Shortage Drives 700% Rally

Micron Technology crossed a landmark valuation threshold on Tuesday, with shares surging 12% to push the company's market cap past $700 billion for the first time — a milestone that places the memory maker among the top 10 most valuable technology companies in the United States.

The stock is now up 125% year-to-date and 700% over the past 12 months, a climb that reflects soaring demand for memory chips driven by the artificial intelligence boom.

The catalyst for Tuesday's move was Micron's announcement that it has begun shipping its largest commercially available solid-state drive. Compared to conventional hard disk drives, solid-state drives store more data at lower power consumption — a meaningful consideration as power availability tightens across AI data centers.

Jeremy Werner, Micron's senior vice president of its core data center unit, said in a press release that the "breakthrough capacity gives data center operators a critical new lever to improve rack-level total cost of ownership, especially as power availability becomes a defining constraint for AI infrastructure scale."

Demand for memory has outpaced supply ever since the AI frenzy accelerated following the late-2022 launch of ChatGPT, and the shortage shows no sign of abating. Chipmakers including Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices require substantial memory capacity to power high-performance AI processors, and the market for that memory is highly concentrated — Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung collectively account for nearly the entire global supply.

CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC after the company's second-quarter earnings report in March that key customers are currently receiving only "50% to two-thirds of their requirements" due to the supply crunch.

The enthusiasm extended beyond Micron itself. SanDisk, a maker of solid-state drives that rely on NAND memory, jumped 12% on Tuesday and is now up approximately sixfold this year. Call-buying dominated options action in both SanDisk and Western Digital as those stocks hit all-time highs, according to trading data.

Options market activity around Micron was particularly striking. More than $2.8 billion in Micron options premium changed hands by midday Tuesday in Chicago, eclipsing the combined dollar volume of options on the SPY and QQQ index ETFs. Micron accounted for 12 of the top 20 options trades in the hour after the opening bell, according to data from SpotGamma, even with no major news event or earnings report imminent.

Implied volatility in Micron rose to 84 on Tuesday — roughly five times the volatility reading for the broader S&P 500. Call volumes outpaced puts, and the largest trades leaned toward later-dated expiries, signaling conviction in a sustained move rather than a short-term position.

Intel added to the semiconductor sector's gains, nearing a $550 billion valuation after a 13% jump on Tuesday that brought its one-year advance to more than 430%. The company's market cap surpassed its peak from the dot-com era, a symbolic threshold for a chipmaker that spent years underperforming its AI-era peers. Intel's stock is up 110% over the past 30 days, a run that analysts have tied in part to bullish options positioning ahead of its earnings report last month.

With the AI infrastructure buildout still in an early phase and memory supply constrained across the industry, Micron's trajectory will remain closely watched — both as a gauge of AI capital spending and as a test of whether options markets are correctly pricing the pace of the company's capacity expansion.

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