Two chipmakers have quietly become the hottest trades on Wall Street this year, and neither of them is Nvidia. Micron Technology and SanDisk have posted gains north of 200% in recent months, riding a wave of insatiable demand for the memory chips that power AI data centers.
Micron’s stock has climbed more than 550% over the past year, pushing its market capitalization toward $600B. SanDisk, meanwhile, has been even more dramatic, with shares surging over 3,000% year-on-year and its market cap climbing above $157B. Both companies now rank among the top performers in the S&P 500.
The AI memory supercycle is real, and it’s just getting started
Every large language model, every GPU cluster, every AI training run needs memory, and lots of it. The specific bottleneck is High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and NAND flash, two categories of chips that sit alongside processors in AI data centers and determine how fast those processors can actually work.
Morgan Stanley forecasts this AI-driven memory shortage will persist for another 2-3 years, with no quick fix to the supply deficit in sight.
