Micron Technology stock rose on Thursday. A warning from the head of Intel about soaring memory prices looks to be reminding shareholders of the company's profit potential.

Micron shares were up 5.5% at $977.5 on Thursday. That's set to take the stock back to where it traded last week before being hit by fears of a slowdown in the development of artificial-intelligence.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan isn't seeing any signs of the AI buildout, or associated memory chip demand, slowing. Speaking this week at an industry conference, he said memory prices had risen between fivefold and sevenfold.

"Last year...I said memory was going to be the big bottleneck and that turned out to be the case and next year is going to be even worse," Tan said. "You cannot have 70%, 80% of your cost coming from memory."

It's a double-edged statement for Micron. A deeper memory-supply crisis means bigger profits for the company. But some of its memory customers-especially those making lower-end smartphones and other devices instead of AI hardware-are already being forced to scale back their specifications or pass on price increases.

Investors should pay attention to comments from Intel, which seems to be interested in dipping its toes back into a memory market it abandoned years ago.

Reuters reported this week that Intel could form a joint venture with South Korean memory-chip maker SK Hynix for U.S. manufacturing, although SK Hynix subsequently said nothing had been finalized. Intel has also backed Kepler Compute, a start-up aiming to disrupt the memory market with an innovative chip design.

American depositary receipts of SK Hynix were up 4.6% on Thursday.

Intel's interest in memory could spell increased competition eventually. But at least in the short term, Intel's big message for Micron is that the memory boom is set to keep rolling.