Micron Just Crossed $600. One Analyst Thinks It's Going to $1,000.Most investors focus on the companies building AI. NVIDIA makes the chips. Amazon builds the data centers. Google writes the software. They're missing the piece that makes all of it actually run. Memory. Micron Technology (MU) just crossed $600 per share for the first time. The stock is up more than 618% over the past year. D.A. Davidson issued a $1,000 price target on April 28. That implies another 67% from where it trades today. That's not hype. The numbers behind it are extraordinary. ## The AI Memory Supercycle AI has changed what memory means. Ten years ago, memory chips were a commodity. Boom-bust cycles. Price-sensitive. Boring. Not anymore. High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM, is the new bottleneck in AI. Every NVIDIA GPU used for training or running large language models needs HBM stacked directly on top of it. Without enough HBM, you can't build more AI. It's that simple. Micron is one of only three companies in the world that can make HBM. The other two are Samsung and SK Hynix, both Korean. Micron is the only American supplier. That matters in a world where the U.S. government is actively pushing to reduce dependence on Asian chip supply chains. The numbers from fiscal Q2 2026 confirm the shift. Revenue nearly tripled year-over-year to $23.9 billion, a 196% increase. Earnings per share hit $12.20, up 682% from the prior year. Gross margin reached a company-record 75%. Q3 2026 guidance calls for $33.5 billion in revenue and a gross margin of 81%. No memory company in history has printed those kinds of margins. ## HBM4: The Next Leg Up Micron isn't just selling into the current AI wave. It's building for the next one. The company has already begun volume shipments of its HBM4 36GB product, designed specifically for NVIDIA's upcoming Vera Rubin GPU architecture. It has sampled a 48GB version and is developing HBM4E for a 2027 production ramp. Management confirmed its entire 2026 HBM supply is sold out under long-term contracts. Even so, Micron can only fulfill 50% to two-thirds of actual customer demand right now. The total addressable market for HBM is projected to nearly triple from $35 billion in 2025 to $100 billion by 2028. To meet that demand, Micron is spending more than $25 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2026 alone, expanding manufacturing in Idaho, New York, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and India. You don't have to trust me. Trust the math. ## The Real Risk The bear case is real. Micron has been here before. Memory semiconductors have brutal cycles. When the market overcorrects on chip demand, it doesn't slow down gracefully. The last major cycle saw Micron's stock fall more than 50% from peak to trough. History could repeat if AI spending slows, if NVIDIA misses a product cycle, or if Samsung and SK Hynix flood the market with HBM capacity faster than demand absorbs it. There's also China exposure. Micron sells meaningfully into Chinese markets. Any escalation in U.S.-China trade restrictions could reduce that revenue overnight. Analyst price targets range from $155 on the low end to $1,000 on the high end. That spread is unusually wide. It reflects genuine disagreement about whether this cycle is different, or just the same story with a new name. ## Bottom Line Micron Technology (MU) has transformed from a commodity memory maker into one of the most strategically critical companies in the entire AI buildout. Revenue up 196%, gross margins at a company-record 75%, sole American supplier of the chips that power every major AI model on earth. Current price: around $600. D.A. Davidson's target: $1,000. Melius Research: $700. TD Cowen: $660. The average across 39 analysts is lower, around $478, reflecting the cyclicality risk. If AI spending holds and HBM supply stays constrained through 2027, Micron's path to $700 and beyond is cleaner than at any point in its 45-year history. The honest caveat: if the cycle turns, the downside is just as dramatic as the upside. This is a stock with enormous conviction on both sides of the argument. The bull case has the data right now.