What happened: Micron Technology (MU) stock surged 5%, putting the memory chipmaker on pace to hit a fresh record on Monday. The rest of the chip complex was poised to climb to new highs, including memory and storage maker Sandisk (SNDK).
What’s behind the move: Micron stock jumped to new intraday highs after the memory chipmaker announced it signed a memory and storage supply deal with AI developer Anthropic (ANTH.PVT).
“This positions Micron to support Anthropic’s multi-year growth trajectory as the frontier AI lab scales its compute strategy for the long term,” Micron said in a press release on Monday.
Micron has been on a tear ahead of its earnings report due on Wednesday, serving as a bellwether for memory demand in AI inference.
UBS analyst Melissa Weathers recently raised the bank’s price target for Micron to $1,500 per share, as demand for DRAM — the type of memory used for data centers, servers, and smartphones — is “still set to vastly outpace supply growth in the coming years, driven by more memory-intensive AI workloads.”
Micron stock is more than 360% in the past six months and hit an all-time high on Thursday, along with Sandisk and storage play Western Digital (WDC).
What else you need to know: Memory has been a major bottleneck in the artificial intelligence trade, with Micron leading the semiconductor complex.
On Monday, peer SK Hynix (000660.KS) surpassed Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) as South Korea’s largest company after raising unit prices amid rising costs due to tighter supply.
Last month, Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), and SK Hynix all made headlines as they reached $1 trillion valuations for the first time.
Ines Ferre is a senior business reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X at @ines_ferre.
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Ines Ferre is a senior business reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X at @ines_ferre.