Memory & Magicks: Micron’s AI Gambit

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It’s early 2026, and the air practically crackles with the scent of silicon and ambition. Everyone, naturally, is betting on the usual suspects – the Cloud Emperors of Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet. Perfectly sensible, in a ‘building a castle on shifting sands’ sort of way. But whispers, like draughts under a poorly sealed door, are circulating about Micron Technology. Apparently, some of the more perceptive scribes at Morgan Stanley and the I/O Fund – those who can tell a bit from a byte, as it were – are suggesting Micron might just be the one to watch. And in the arcane art of stock picking, that’s akin to finding a genuinely honest tax collector. A rare find indeed.

The Bottleneck, or Why Everything’s Getting Stuck

For the last few years, the problem with building these ‘thinking machines’ – what the youngsters call ‘Artificial Intelligence’ – wasn’t a lack of cleverness, but a lack of bricks. Specifically, graphics processing units, those shiny, power-hungry things made by Nvidia and AMD. They were the engines, and everything ground to a halt if you couldn’t get enough of them. But the world, as it always does, is getting complicated.

We’re moving beyond chatbots and ‘large language models’ – which mostly seem adept at generating plausible nonsense – and into a world of self-driving contraptions, robots that might one day demand equal rights (and probably a good oiling), and ‘agentic AI’ – which sounds suspiciously like giving machines permission to cause trouble independently.1 This requires, shall we say, a lot more computing power. Research and Markets, those diligent bean counters, estimate the total addressable market for all this will reach a staggering $5.3 trillion by 2035. A number so large, it’s practically a philosophical statement.

This isn’t just about throwing more shiny engines at the problem. It’s about the whole system. The new bottleneck isn’t just capacity; it’s memory and storage. And that, dear reader, is where Micron begins to look interesting. They don’t make the engines, they make the… well, the filing cabinets. But a very, very fast filing cabinet. And in the age of information, a fast filing cabinet is a powerful thing.

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How Fast is the Filing Cabinet Growing?

Micron specializes in chips for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), dynamic random access memory (DRAM), and NAND flash. For their first fiscal quarter of 2026, they reported revenue of $13.6 billion – a rather impressive 57% increase year-over-year. DRAM accounted for the lion’s share, bringing in $10.8 billion – a 69% jump. Numbers like that tend to make even the most cynical financial observer raise an eyebrow.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest growth came from their cloud memory and mobile/client business units. Cloud services, naturally, are voracious consumers of memory. And everyone keeps upgrading their phones. It’s a vicious cycle, really. But a profitable one.

Management estimates the total addressable market for HBM solutions will grow at a rate of 40% per year through 2028, reaching $100 billion. And here’s a curious detail: that’s a faster growth rate than the overall AI market itself. Which suggests that Micron might be riding a particularly strong wave. A wave that could potentially lift them quite high.

Is Micron a Good Bet? Or Just Another Shiny Object?

Despite all this, Micron’s stock currently trades at a forward price-to-earnings multiple of around 12. Which, frankly, seems… reasonable. Almost suspiciously so. It suggests that most investors haven’t yet fully grasped the potential. They see a memory chip maker, not an AI powerhouse in the making.

Given the secular tailwinds driving the AI market, the increasing importance of HBM, and Micron’s impressive growth and attractive valuation, now seems like a rather opportune time to accumulate shares. Before the market decides that Micron is, in fact, the one to watch. And before the price gets… complicated. It’s a gamble, of course. All investments are. But sometimes, the most sensible thing to do is to bet on the filing cabinet. After all, even the most brilliant engine needs somewhere to store its thoughts.

1 Agentic AI, or ‘letting the machines have a little fun’. The implications of this are, shall we say, being actively debated by those of us who still remember the cautionary tales.

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2026-01-28 00:32