Micron Technology rose Friday after Oracle reported a key metric that boosted artificial-intelligence trade stocks.
Micron stock advanced 0.8% to $985 in premarket trading on Friday after ending Thursday down 4.9%. Futures tracking the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite were both up around 0.5%.
Shares of the memory chip maker have fallen 3.9% for the week as of the closing bell on Thursday.
Micron, along with other AI trade stocks, advanced Friday after Oracle reported that sales from its cloud infrastructure segment, which rents out AI servers over the internet, rose 121% in the fiscal first quarter to $7.4 billion.
Oracle's cloud infrastructure unit also represents the majority of the company's $664 billion backlog.
That's good news for memory chip makers like Micron.
Cloud infrastructure for AI uses both NAND and DRAM memory architectures to deliver ultra-high-performance. Out of the two memory types, DRAM provides the high-speed working memory while NAND flash offers the dense, non-volatile long-term data storage.
It's just the latest example that the memory chip supply crunch is here to stay. Wall Street expects the average selling prices of memory chips to rise more than 20% overall in the third quarter of this year from the previous quarter and that both DRAM and NAND will continue to be undersupplied moving into 2027.
The question for investors is how Micron stock will perform in the runup to fiscal fourth-quarter earnings on Sept. 30. Shares have been rangebound for the last nine weeks, trading along its 50-day moving average, around the $931 level, on a weekly chart.
Since Micron stock closed at $1,213.56 on June 25, shares have declined 19%. While investors have pushed the shares above the $1,000 level several times recently, the stock hasn't been able told that price level for any meaningful amount of time.
Barron's previously argued Micron could double in price when it was trading around above $1,100. It has a way to go, but the trajectory is upward.
Oracle earnings were a good sign for Micron, but investors might have to wait until the end of the month for the next catalyst.