Revenue Quintupled at AI Memory Maker Micron

Memory maker Micron said revenue nearly quintupled to $54.2 billion in the quarter ending Sept.3, as demand for high-bandwidth memory hardware for AI chips showed no sign of slowing down.

Micron’s gross margin nearly doubled to $86.8%, thanks to its price hikes, allowing it to generate an astounding $33 billion in free cash flow during the quarter, up from about $17.5 billion in free cash flow in the prior fiscal quarter. That’s higher than Apple’s $32 billion in free cash flow in the July quarter, and also far higher than even Nvidia’s most recent cash result.

High-bandwidth memory makers like Micron are effectively sold out through next year, and the real test will come in a few years when long-term agreements it signed this year with large cloud providers and other customers lapse. Still, those agreements have turned such memory firms into guaranteed money makers for the foreseeable future. Micron and its ilk are also funding demand for their products, as each of the three major HBM providers invested in Anthropic’s latest funding round.

Micron’s gain is seemingly everyone else’s pain. Nvidia has tested reduced-memory versions of its next-generation Rubin Ultra chip, and Nvidia’s latest chip system prices are rising about 17%, driven partly by memory costs, The Information has reported. Meta and Apple, whose consumer hardware also uses products from memory firms like Micron, have also flagged price hikes due in part to memory prices.