By Adam Levine

When memory-maker Micron Technology reports its third-quarter earnings on Wednesday afternoon, Wall Street analysts are expecting a continued recovery from its cyclical woes of 2022 and 2023. On average, they estimate earnings per share of $1.60, up from 62 cents last year on sales of $8.9 billion, up 30% from last year.

Memory is an up-and-down business, with regular inventory cycles driving prices to extremes. As a result, Micron's historical revenue growth tends to make sharp moves.

But today, memory demand is being driven more by the secular force of the AI investment boom, and the very expensive memory that goes into these data centers. Wall Street analysts are mostly confident that the accelerating pace of data center investment will continue through this year into next.

Shares of Micron are up nearly 50% this year.

There may also be a tailwind building as consumer smartphone and PC makers try to add on-device AI capabilities. For example Apple iPhones that support Apple Intelligence all sport eight gigabytes of memory, up from the four or six gigabytes iPhones had since 2020. If that sort of upgrade becomes common, it could give a boost to Micron's sales to this end market, even if smartphone and PC sales remain flat.

Finally, Micron's storage segment is expected to contract by 7% from last year in the third quarter, though this segment showed a surprise upside when Micron reported its second quarter results.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com

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June 25, 2025 10:14 ET (14:14 GMT)

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