Memory chipmakers' shares keep climbing. In early Wall Street trading today, Micron rose about 1.7%, SanDisk about 1% and South Korea's SK Hynix about 2.7%, according to TipRanks. The gains follow a day-long rally in AI and chip stocks after Anthropic's IPO filing, which sent investors back to the companies that supply the hardware behind the models.
Why memory
AI models consume huge amounts of fast memory, above all HBM, the memory attached to AI accelerators in data centers. Only a handful of manufacturers in the world can produce it at scale, and every giant computing deal, like the one Broadcom is financing for Anthropic, ultimately translates into memory chip orders as well.
Bank of America kept its buy rating on Micron with a $1,550 price target, saying it expects memory supply to stay tight in 2027 and 2028.
A huge dividend on the table
At SK Hynix, according to a report published today, the company is considering a special dividend of about $12 billion. The stock rose about 5% in Seoul following the report. The company is due to present its third-quarter results tomorrow, and to discuss shareholder returns as well. SanDisk will report on Thursday, and the options market is pricing in a sharp move in the stock around the release.
What it means
Memory has gone from one of the most cyclical and least glamorous products in the chip industry to one of the bottlenecks of the AI revolution. As long as AI labs keep raising and spending huge sums on infrastructure, memory makers benefit. The question, as always in this industry, is what happens when supply catches up with demand.
