Meet Micron, the under-the-radar chipmaker that just reported a 346% sales surge and helped stop a global AI selloff

Micron may not be a household name but it may just be among the most important tech companies in the AI era, and definitely one with a surprising backstory. On Thursday, the memory chipmaker reported an eye-popping 346% surge in quarterly revenue. As if that wasn’t enough, it reported a profit of $28.2 billion for the quarter, almost 15 times higher than the same quarter last year. By all accounts, the company blew past analyst expectations, sending its stock soaring almost 16% in after-hours trading. The rally continued into Thursday evening, with Micron’s shares closing up 15% at $1,213 per share. Micron’s stellar results have helped stabilize markets after a bruising selloff in AI and tech-related stocks earlier this week by pushing up futures for both the tech-heavy NASDAQ and the broader S&P 500 indexes. It has also given Wall Street hope that the AI trade still has some steam. “This shows the memory and chip trade is well-intact and still in the early stages of playing out with the AI Revolution still in the third inning,” wrote tech bull and Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a Wednesday note. Today, Micron boasts a $1.3 trillion market cap and is one of the three biggest computer memory manufacturers in the world, with Samsung and SK Hynix, and the only major one based in the U.S. But far from a perennial sure-bet, Micron comes from humble roots and took the long way to success. And that’s evident in the business model. While Micron’s business is anything but flashy, it makes something just as essential: the memory chips that store and move data at blistering speeds inside AI servers. High bandwidth memory chips like those made by Micron help AI processors function by stacking multiple layers of memory directly on top of each other and connecting them with microscopic wiring that allows data to flow at extremely high speeds. Because training a large language model requires moving billions of data points per second between processors and memory, the chips Micron mak