A record $54.23 billion quarter capped Micron's best year on record, and independent market data says the memory squeeze behind it keeps tightening into 2027.
· 5 min read · L2 Silicon · The Pulse, 30 September 2026
In this story: Micron · High-bandwidth memory
Micron is one of only three companies in the world that mass-produce the memory chips that store data inside phones, laptops, PCs and the servers that run AI. For the three months to early September 2026, the company's fiscal fourth quarter, it made $54.23 billion in revenue, a record for the company, up from $41.46 billion the quarter before and roughly four and a half times the $11.32 billion it made in the same quarter a year earlier. Its profit for the quarter, under standard US accounting rules, was $37.70 billion, or $32.87 for every share of stock. For the full fiscal year, Micron took in $133.19 billion, versus $37.38 billion the year before. 'Micron delivered record fiscal 2026 results, and we expect an even stronger fiscal 2027,' said Sanjay Mehrotra, the company's chairman and CEO, in the earnings release.
The reason Micron's numbers jumped so much is that the chips it sells have gotten far more expensive, because there is not enough memory to go around. AI data centres need huge amounts of a special kind of memory called HBM (high-bandwidth memory), which sits next to the processors that run AI and feeds them data fast enough to keep up. Micron is one of just three companies that make it, alongside Samsung and SK hynix. Independent data backs up that this is an industry-wide squeeze, not just one company's story. TrendForce, a memory-market research firm with no stake in Micron, forecast on 29 September that HBM's blended average selling price will rise 121 percent year over year in 2027, and separately that the HBM market stays supply-constrained through 2027. A day later, TrendForce forecast that ordinary DRAM contract prices, the plainer memory used in PCs and phones, will rise another 10 to 15 percent in the final quarter of 2026 alone. And Nvidia, which buys huge amounts of memory for its own AI chips, already told its own investors in late August that memory costs were a reason it was guiding its profit margin down to a 71 to 72 percent floor. Put together: the world's biggest AI-chip buyer named memory as a cost pressure, the industry's own independent analysts forecast memory prices climbing into 2027, and now the memory maker itself has reported the record quarter all of that would predict.
The next checkpoint is Micron's fiscal first quarter of 2027, when the company has guided investors to expect $61.5 billion in revenue, give or take $1.5 billion. A result well below that guidance would be the first sign the shortage is easing faster than Micron expects. TrendForce's own forecasts point to relief taking even longer: its HBM outlook has the market staying supply-constrained through all of 2027, with no clear turning point named before 2028.
This desk read Micron's own press release directly, so the revenue, profit and CEO-quote figures above are solid. We could not pin down a fully citable transcript of Micron's own earnings call with further CEO detail on 2027 and 2028 supply, so this story does not quote beyond what the company's own release says. We also could not find a Samsung or SK hynix release from the same week addressing their own 2027 HBM pricing, which would have let us compare one memory maker's account against a rival's.
If you are not buying a new phone, laptop or desktop computer soon, nothing here touches your wallet today. But memory chips go into nearly every device with a screen, and when the three companies that make most of the world's supply are all reporting this kind of pricing and scarcity, it tends to show up later as a few extra dollars, or more, on the next phone or laptop you buy.
Everything above is written from these. Each line says what that document proves.
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