Micron Technology became a $400 billion company only a few weeks after topping a $300 billion valuation, as the largest U.S. maker of memory chips rides the artificial-intelligence boom.

Micron’s stock rose more than 7% Friday to close at a record $362.75, pushing the company’s market capitalization to $408 billion, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Micron crossed $300 billion in market value on Dec. 22.

The memory-chip maker has seen its shares gain over the last year, as memory shortages driven by increasing AI demand give Micron and its competitors more pricing power.

Among its S&P 500 index peers, Micron is projected to have the 10th-highest revenue growth rate of 99% for fiscal-year 2026, according to Dow Jones Market Data, while it has the 27th-lowest forward price-to-earnings ratio among the index’s components.

South Korean-listed shares of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix jumped earlier this month after reports that the companies were looking to raise prices for dynamic random-access memory by up to 70% this quarter. Demand from AI-chip makers such as Nvidia for high-bandwidth memory, a type of DRAM, has benefitted the three top memory-chip makers.

Morgan Stanley analyst Shawn Kim named Micron as one of his global top 10 stock picks among DRAM suppliers, as memory capacity remains constrained while there’s “unusually long” visibility into order demand from an increase in AI inference, or running AI models after training.

Kim said in a Thursday note that execution and transition are a risk for memory players this year, rather than demand. He sees memory prices going higher and other “favorable conditions” in the industry continuing through next year.

Access to memory components is becoming more important for AI developers. Reasoning models with greater context-, image- and video-generation capabilities and the adoption of AI agents require more memory than previous AI models, Kim noted. That is leading pricing power for Micron and other memory companies to shift “at lightning speed,” he said.

Kim’s team projects that text-only AI inference could make up 35% of global memory supply for DRAM and 92% of supply for NAND, another type of memory, this year. And they see potential upside to the 70% price hikes for both memory types, citing checks of the supply chain.

Micron’s stock also benefited Friday from news that Mark Liu, a board member and former executive at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, purchased more than 23,000 Micron shares this week, translating to about $7.8 million worth of stock.

The stock move “tells you all you need to know about [Micron] and memory-stock sentiment right now,” Mizuho desk-based analyst Jordan Klein said in a Friday note to clients. With Micron’s stock already on a run, Liu’s purchase shows confidence that it can go higher still. Micron’s stock is up 13% so far this year.

Klein also noted that Micron’s DRAM capacity is expected to be flat this year as it waits for more clean-room space, where semiconductor manufacturing takes place, in 2027.

The lack of clean-room space in the near term, coupled with growing demand, helps make a case for more bullish investors, Klein said.