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Micron Made $54 Billion in Three Months. The Same Shortage Is Raising the Price of Your Next Laptop.

Memory maker Micron's revenue nearly quintupled as AI data centres buy up chips. Phones and PCs are paying for it. How to plan your next hardware purchase.

Echelon by TIBLOGICS

6 min read 5 readsOctober 3, 2026

Micron Technology, one of the three companies that make most of the world's memory chips, reported revenue of $54.23 billion for the three months to the end of August. A year earlier the same quarter brought in about a fifth of that: revenue rose 379%. Its profit for the quarter, $37.70 billion, was larger than its entire revenue for the previous financial year.

That is not a story about one company. It is the clearest measure yet of how hard AI data centres are pulling on the world's supply of memory, and the same pull is pushing up what businesses and households pay for laptops and phones.

What happened

Micron announced its fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year results on September 30. The confirmed numbers, from the company's release and coverage by CNBC and Quartz:

Quarterly revenue: $54.23 billion, up 379% from a year earlier and 31% from the previous quarter, beating analysts' estimates.
Profit: $37.70 billion in net income under standard accounting, or $33.42 a share on the adjusted basis analysts follow.
Full year: $133.19 billion in revenue, up 256% from $37.38 billion the year before.
Where it came from: Micron's core data centre unit brought in $18.0 billion, more than 11 times its total a year earlier. The cloud memory unit, which includes the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacked next to AI processors, brought in $16.3 billion.
Next quarter: Micron expects about $61.5 billion in revenue.

Two forward-looking details matter most. Micron says it has agreements in place for the vast majority of its HBM supply for calendar 2027, at significantly higher prices than this year. And it expects the memory industry to remain short of supply through both 2027 and 2028. It is raising spending to build more factory clean-room space, with about $25 billion of capital spending planned for the first half of its new financial year, much of it aimed at capacity for late 2028 and beyond. The shares slipped in after-hours trading as investors weighed that spending against the outlook.

Chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra put the company's view plainly: "AI is becoming Super Intelligence (SI), and memory enhances this intelligence".

Why it matters

Every AI model runs on memory. The chips that train and serve models need enormous amounts of fast memory beside them, and the memory makers earn far more on that than on the ordinary chips in a laptop or phone. With only three major producers and factories that take years to build, supply has shifted towards AI. Everyone else competes for what is left.

The forecasts on what that means for devices differ in detail but agree in direction:

Gartner forecast in February that combined memory and solid-state storage prices would rise about 130% by the end of 2026, lifting PC prices about 17% and smartphone prices about 13% compared with 2025. It expected PC shipments to fall 10.4% and smartphones 8.4%, with entry-level devices hit hardest.
IDC expects the average smartphone price to reach a record $523 this year, up 14%, and shipments to fall 12.9%, which it calls the biggest annual drop on record. It says the decline will hurt low-end Android makers most.
PC makers, including Dell, HP and Lenovo, have warned customers of price increases, with reports of rises of up to about 20%.

Micron's own outlook, a tight market through 2028, suggests this is not a short spike.

What is still unclear

How long prices stay high. New factory capacity is aimed at late 2028. Until then, relief depends on AI demand slowing, which nobody is forecasting.
Whose forecast is right. Gartner and IDC use different methods and timeframes, and both were published before this quarter's results.
Whether the spending pays off. Investors' cool reaction shows the worry: memory has historically been a boom-and-bust business, and record capacity built for 2028 could arrive just as demand cools.

What it means for your business

1. Plan hardware purchases now, not when something breaks. If you know your team needs new laptops in the next 12 months, get quotes today and ask suppliers how long they will hold a price. With the market expected to stay tight, waiting is unlikely to make it cheaper.

2. Buy the memory you need, not the maximum. Memory is now one of the most expensive parts of a computer. For office work, a mid-range configuration is usually enough. Save the high-memory machines for people who run heavy software or local AI models.

3. Extend the life of what you have. A fresh operating system install, a battery replacement or a cleanup of startup programs can add a year or two to a working machine. Consider certified refurbished devices for roles that do not need the latest hardware.

4. Use the cloud for heavy lifting. Rather than buying powerful machines to run AI locally, rent the capacity when you need it. The data centres are where the memory is going anyway.

5. Design for cheaper phones. If your customers are in Francophone Africa or other markets where budget Android phones dominate, IDC's and Gartner's warnings about entry-level devices matter. Customers may keep older phones longer. Keep your website, app and payment flow light enough to run well on them.

Questions You Should Be Asking

What hardware will we need in the next year, and have we priced it this month?
Are we paying for more memory than our people actually use?
Would renting computing power be cheaper than buying a powerful machine?
Does our product still work well on a three-year-old budget phone?

What To Watch Next

Micron's next results, due around December, against its $61.5 billion forecast. Watch also for price announcements from the big PC and phone makers ahead of the holiday season. For the other side of the same scarcity, see how AI chips are being smuggled, rented and financed.

Sources

#micron#memory chips#dram#ai data centres#hardware prices#small business

Source: Micron: Micron Technology reports record fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year 2026 results

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💼 AI for BusinessAI Curated

Micron Made $54 Billion in Three Months. The Same Shortage Is Raising the Price of Your Next Laptop.

Memory maker Micron's revenue nearly quintupled as AI data centres buy up chips. Phones and PCs are paying for it. How to plan your next hardware purchase.

Echelon by TIBLOGICS

6 min read 5 readsOctober 3, 2026

What happened

Micron announced its fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year results on September 30. The confirmed numbers, from the company's release and coverage by CNBC and Quartz:

Quarterly revenue: $54.23 billion, up 379% from a year earlier and 31% from the previous quarter, beating analysts' estimates.
Profit: $37.70 billion in net income under standard accounting, or $33.42 a share on the adjusted basis analysts follow.
Full year: $133.19 billion in revenue, up 256% from $37.38 billion the year before.
Where it came from: Micron's core data centre unit brought in $18.0 billion, more than 11 times its total a year earlier. The cloud memory unit, which includes the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacked next to AI processors, brought in $16.3 billion.
Next quarter: Micron expects about $61.5 billion in revenue.

Chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra put the company's view plainly: "AI is becoming Super Intelligence (SI), and memory enhances this intelligence".

Why it matters

The forecasts on what that means for devices differ in detail but agree in direction:

Gartner forecast in February that combined memory and solid-state storage prices would rise about 130% by the end of 2026, lifting PC prices about 17% and smartphone prices about 13% compared with 2025. It expected PC shipments to fall 10.4% and smartphones 8.4%, with entry-level devices hit hardest.
IDC expects the average smartphone price to reach a record $523 this year, up 14%, and shipments to fall 12.9%, which it calls the biggest annual drop on record. It says the decline will hurt low-end Android makers most.
PC makers, including Dell, HP and Lenovo, have warned customers of price increases, with reports of rises of up to about 20%.

Micron's own outlook, a tight market through 2028, suggests this is not a short spike.

What is still unclear

How long prices stay high. New factory capacity is aimed at late 2028. Until then, relief depends on AI demand slowing, which nobody is forecasting.
Whose forecast is right. Gartner and IDC use different methods and timeframes, and both were published before this quarter's results.
Whether the spending pays off. Investors' cool reaction shows the worry: memory has historically been a boom-and-bust business, and record capacity built for 2028 could arrive just as demand cools.

What it means for your business

4. Use the cloud for heavy lifting. Rather than buying powerful machines to run AI locally, rent the capacity when you need it. The data centres are where the memory is going anyway.

Questions You Should Be Asking

What hardware will we need in the next year, and have we priced it this month?
Are we paying for more memory than our people actually use?
Would renting computing power be cheaper than buying a powerful machine?
Does our product still work well on a three-year-old budget phone?

What To Watch Next

Sources

#micron#memory chips#dram#ai data centres#hardware prices#small business

Source: Micron: Micron Technology reports record fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year 2026 results

Ready to implement AI in your business?

Our team builds the AI systems you just read about. Start with a free 30-minute discovery meeting.

Book Free Meeting →