By Adam Clark

Micron Technology stock was rising early Thursday. Its peer Samsung Electronics is confident the memory-chip boom will continue for the foreseeable future.

Samsung reported earnings Thursday, with its net profit more than doubling from a year earlier, driven by its chips business. More importantly for Micron, its executives expect demand to outstrip supply across the memory-chip sector, driven by the need to power artificial intelligence.

Micron shares were up 1.5% in premarket trading Thursday, after gaining 6% the previous day.

Micron is the chief rival of South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix in making high-bandwidth memory chips, which are crucial for the latest AI processors from the likes of Nvidia. Surging demand for HBM chips, which carry higher margins than typical memory components, has been a big driver for Micron's share price more than quadrupling in the past 12 months.

"Despite our efforts to ramp up supply, major customer demand for HBM in 2026 still exceeds available supply from us," Samsung executives told analysts on an earnings call Thursday.

All three of the major players are racing to produce the next generation of HBM chips, named HBM4, to customers. Samsung said its HBM4 product is now in full-scale production and it expects shipments to begin in February. Micron is set to ramp up its own HBM4 production in the second quarter of 2026.

In addition to HBM chips, Micron competes with Samsung in dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, which is used in desktop computers and servers, and NAND flash memory found in smartphones and solid-state hard drives.

"We expect a significant shortage of supply relative to demand to continue across all product categories, whether it's HBM, conventional DRAM or NAND," Samsung executives said.

As Barron's has warned, memory-chip suppliers have in the past built too much capacity during the upswing of a semiconductor cycle, causing crashes later on. However, Samsung said supply growth is expected to be constrained in 2026 and 2027.

"2026 is projected to be a 'Golden Era' for the memory industry, as the mass production of HBM4 aligns with the maximization of profitability in conventional DRAM," said Counterpoint Research analyst Jeongku Choi.

Counterpoint Research forecasts memory prices will rise 50% in the first quarter of this year.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

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January 29, 2026 07:16 ET (12:16 GMT)

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