Micron Technology (MU.US) disclosed that its director, Teyin Liu, purchased 23,200 shares of Micron common stock, a transaction valued at $7.8 million. The purchase was made within a price range of $336.63 to $337.50 per share. Following this transaction, Teyin Liu now directly holds 25,910 shares of Micron stock. Data shows that Micron's stock price surged over 240% in 2025 and has climbed nearly 18% again this year. Micron's stellar stock performance is driven by the storage industry entering an upcycle, fueled by the wave of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure development. In 2025, as global AI infrastructure construction entered a period of explosive growth, the storage industry welcomed a "super cycle." The core logic is twofold: on one hand, AI servers demand significantly higher storage capacity and bandwidth compared to standard servers; on the other hand, industry capacity is shifting towards high-end storage products (like HBM), squeezing production capacity for traditional storage products, thereby triggering a price surge across the entire storage industry. Notably, this "super cycle" in the storage sector is expected to persist throughout 2026, a view supported by the extremely optimistic performance outlook Micron provided in its earnings report last December. At that time, Micron projected second-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue between $18.3 billion and $19.1 billion, surpassing the repeatedly raised market expectation of $14.4 billion; it also forecast adjusted earnings per share of $8.22 to $8.62, far exceeding the market consensus of $4.71. This guidance indicates exceptionally strong demand for memory chips amid the global AI infrastructure wave. The company also raised its capital expenditure forecast for fiscal 2026 from $18 billion to $20 billion, highlighting how the persistently explosive demand for memory chips is beginning to drive accelerated capacity expansion. Analysts at Citigroup hold an even more aggressive bullish stance. These analysts believe that, driven by the proliferation of AI agents and surging memory demand for AI CPUs, memory chip prices will experience runaway increases in 2026. Citigroup analysts have drastically raised their 2026 average selling price (ASP) growth forecast for DRAM from 53% to 88%, and for NAND from 44% to 74%. Analysts at Nomura judge that this "storage industry super cycle," which began in the second half of 2025, will last at least until 2027, with truly meaningful new supply unlikely to emerge until early 2028 at the earliest. Nomura analysts suggest that investors should continue to overweight leading storage stocks in 2026, focusing on the "price-profit-valuation" triple play in memory chips as the main investment theme for the year, rather than viewing storage merely as a single HBM narrative.
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