By Daniel Sparks
Publication Date: 2026-05-31 01:33:00
Micron Technology shares jumped more than 19% on Tuesday, the memory-chip maker’s biggest single-session gain since 2011, and the move pushed the company past $1 trillion in market value for the first time — making it one of the 10 most valuable public companies in the U.S., as of this writing. The catalyst for the stock’s big surge this week was a sharply higher price target from a major Wall Street firm. And this was followed by several other analysts raising their targets significantly. The first analyst — the one who caused shares to soar — tripled its firm’s target for the stock from $535 to $1,625. In the following days, two additional targets that were revised to particularly high levels came in at $1,500 and $1,750.
Behind all of this, though, there really is a bull case building: artificial intelligence (AI) has reshaped the memory business in ways that could prove lasting rather than temporary.
After its recent surge, Micron is now up an extraordinary 240% year to date and more than 900% over the past year.
Even so, weighed against its own earnings power, the stock may not be as expensive as a trillion-dollar market capitalization implies.
Image source: Getty Images.
A tighter memory market
For most of its history, Micron sold a commodity: memory chips whose prices swung with supply and demand, lifting profits in good years and erasing them in bad ones. AI, however, appears to have changed that — at least for now. The company has committed its entire 2026…
