MU
The bear case still looks pretty hefty
Micron just got knocked around in July, but Bank of America is basically saying: even if the memory cycle rolls over, this isn’t your grandfather’s Micron. Analyst Vivek Arya argues that even a bear case with DRAM and NAND prices falling hard could still leave Micron earning close to $100 per share.
Why that matters
That’s the kind of number that makes yesterday’s cycle peak look quaint. BofA says Micron’s previous earnings high was around $12 per share in 2018, so even the pessimistic version of today’s story would still be more than 8x that level. Translation: the market may be treating MU like a commodity sleeper, while AI demand and HBM demand are giving it a much juicier setup.
The new memory playbook
The other twist is that memory isn’t quite the same weekly-spot-market drama it used to be. BofA says Samsung and Micron expect roughly 50%–70% of capacity to eventually sit under long-term supply agreements, which should help calm some of the price-chaos vibes.
And then there’s AI, the hungry monster eating up high-bandwidth memory. BofA says the real bottleneck isn’t just raw compute — it’s the memory attached to it. That’s the stuff investors care about, because if AI stays hot, Micron’s earnings cushion could be thicker than the market thinks.
Big picture
BofA kept its Buy rating and $1,550 price target on Micron, which implies hefty upside from where the stock sat at the start of August. In plain English: even if the memory party gets quieter, Micron may still be a lot more profitable than the old cycle models suggest.