MW Micron's stock climbs on this fresh sign of booming memory prices

By Britney Nguyen

Lenovo said memory prices went up 40% to 50% in the last quarter - and they could double this quarter

Micron's stock was up about 4% on Thursday morning.

Micron Technology investors just got another sign of the strong pricing power that memory-chip companies have right now.

Personal-computer maker Lenovo Group (HK:992) said Thursday it expects worldwide memory-supply constraints to continue throughout the year, as it reported that net income for the December quarter fell 21% from the previous year.

Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing told Bloomberg that the memory supply shortage "is not simply a short-term fluctuation." The price of memory went up by 40% to 50% in the last quarter for the PC giant, he said. In the current quarter, Yang told the publication that its contract price could double.

Micron's stock was up 4% on Thursday morning following the comments. The company supplies Lenovo with dynamic random-access memory components for its PCs.

The day before, Micron sought to calm investors' nerves after reports said it was falling behind memory competitors Samsung Electronics (KR:005930) and SK Hynix (KR:000660) with its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips.

South Korea's Samsung was reported to be starting mass production of its HBM4 for use in Nvidia's (NVDA) Vera Rubin graphics processing units, while an earlier report from research firm SemiAnalysis had said that Micron's HBM4 was unlikely to be part of the supply for Rubin's first 12 months, as the offering has not been able to meet pin-speed requirements set by Nvidia. The South Korean chip maker announced on Thursday that it has started to mass-produce its sixth-generation HBM chips, while commercial products are shipping to customers.

See more: Micron's stock pops. Here's what an executive just said to calm nervous investors.

During a talk at a Wolfe Research conference on Wednesday, Micron CFO Mark Murphy called the reports "inaccurate" and said that the company's HBM4 is in high-volume production. Shipments to customers "successfully" ramped in the first quarter, he added, which is a quarter ahead of schedule.

Murphy said that Micron is "highly confident in our HBM4 product performance and quality and reliability." He affirmed that Micron "is in the best competitive position it's ever been in, at a perfect time."

He also pointed to strengthening demand for memory from the AI build-out - which should benefit Micron - including recent lifts to capital-expenditure forecasts at hyperscalers, including Alphabet's Google Cloud $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ and Amazon.com's (AMZN) AWS.

The supply-and-demand imbalance has allowed memory and storage makers, including Seagate Technology $(STX)$ and Western Digital $(WDC)$, to raise prices. The companies have also been offering higher-capacity products that cost more money. And they have been hesitant to add capacity, due to fears of ending up with too much supply if demand slows down in what is typically a cyclical industry.

Read on: Here's how Micron's stock can hit $500, according to Deutsche Bank

Meanwhile, Mizuho trading-desk analyst Jordan Klein noted that Lenovo came up short with its gross-margin guidance, which he attributed to rising memory prices.

Fellow PC makers HP $(HPQ)$, Dell Technologies $(DELL)$ "and every single" handset maker is at the "same risk," Klein said in a Thursday note.

While the companies are eating the memory-price hikes now, Klein said the cost will eventually be passed on to consumers. That could lead to reduced demand from customers over time, he said, whether from prices being too high or from supply being limited.

-Britney Nguyen

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February 12, 2026 10:28 ET (15:28 GMT)

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