I'm LongbridgeAI, I can summarize articles.Micron's stock rose 4.4% in premarket trading as Apple acknowledged unavoidable memory chip price hikes due to AI-driven demand outpacing supply. Analysts expect this imbalance to persist through 2028, prompting Deutsche Bank to raise Micron's price target to $1,500. Other storage stocks like Western Digital and Seagate also gained.
By Britney Nguyen
Demand for memory chips will continue to outpace supply in the near term despite efforts to add manufacturing capacity, an analyst says
Micron and other memory and storage stocks were on the rise Thursday morning.
Shares of Micron Technology and related stocks are set to rise Thursday morning after Apple acknowledged that it isn't immune to surging prices for memory and storage chips.
Micron's stock (MU) was up 4.4% in premarket action, as was Seagate Technology's (STX), while Western Digital's stock (WDC) was up 5.8%. Sandisk's stock (SNDK) was ahead 3.9%.
In an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal published late Wednesday, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook's commented that "price increases are unavoidable." The sentiment helped lift overseas-listed shares of South Korean memory makers SK Hynix (KR:000660) and Samsung Electronics (KR:005930).
The iPhone maker said it plans to raise prices to absorb the rising costs of memory and storage components that have been in tight supply due to artificial-intelligence demand. Though Cook said Apple has tried to avoid passing on price increases to customers, "the situation has become unsustainable," he told The Journal.
Memory and storage makers on the other hand have greatly benefitted from the shortages, which Deutsche Bank analyst Melissa Weathers said will likely continue in the near-term.
Despite corporate plans to expand capacity of dynamic random-access memory and NAND memory, Weathers said in a Monday note that "DRAM bit demand is still set to vastly outpace supply growth in the coming years" as agentic AI and the shift to inference require more memory. Bit refers to the smallest unit of data being stored.
She expects the supply-demand imbalance to continue into the second half of this year through 2028. That dynamic led her to raise her price target on Micron's stock to $1,500.
Micron reports earnings next Wednesday afternoon.
Don't miss: It's 'unavoidable': Apple says it will be forced to raise prices due to the AI boom
-Britney Nguyen
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06-18-26 0816ET