High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is sold out through 2027, with Micron customers facing acute shortages as demand outpaces supply.

Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) has become the most improbable trillion-dollar story of the AI buildout. Shares closed at $1,015.80, up 502.43% over the past year, and the market capitalization now sits near $1.147 trillion. The valuation prices in an industry defined by boom and bust for forty years, raising the question of whether the AI cycle actually broke that pattern or is simply running the wildest version of it.

Management insists the answer has changed. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told investors that "the memory industry has been structurally transformed by the proliferation of AI" and that supply tightness will persist beyond calendar 2027. The order book, contracts, and margins all support him, although history does not.

Fiscal third-quarter revenue reached $41.46 billion, up 345.72% year over year, at a non-GAAP gross margin of 84.9%—a margin profile that says pricing power, not volume, is doing the work. Management guided the September quarter to $50.0 billion in revenue, a single quarter larger than the company's fiscal 2024 full-year total.

Micron has now signed 16 Strategic Customer Agreements, mostly five-year take-or-pay contracts covering roughly 20% of DRAM volume and a third of NAND, with cumulative minimum-price revenue near $100 billion. Customers are also wiring in $22 billion of cash deposits and letters of credit. Mehrotra was blunt on scarcity: Micron can fill only half to two-thirds of its biggest AI customers' demand.

HBM scarcity now bottlenecks NVIDIA (NVDA) accelerator shipments, making memory the single binding constraint on the entire AI buildout. The bear case remains compelling: Samsung, SK Hynix, and China's CXMT are racing to add HBM capacity, and every past commodity supercycle felt permanent at the top.