The trillion-dollar club that no one expected: Micron and SK Hynix catch up to Samsung

Two years ago, RAM was the least promising sector of the chip market. A well-established business with tight margins and headlines about price drops and excess inventory. Now, AI has turned everything upside down: US manufacturer Micron Technology and South Korean manufacturer SK Hynix recently surpassed the trillion-dollar milestone in market capitalization just 24 hours apart, a milestone that Samsung had reached some weeks ago. For the first time in history, the world's three major memory manufacturers simultaneously achieved one of the highest stock market valuations. Micron's value soared 19% on Wall Street, recording its biggest single-session gain since 2011. This historic move came immediately after UBS, a major investment bank, tripled the company’s valuation from $535 to $1,625. SK Hynix's stock price has also experienced a rise, thus heralding a new boom in the technology sector.

The main driving force behind this unprecedented boom is HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), a type of specialized chip used by Nvidia GPUs for the processing of immense volumes of data needed to run large-scale AI models. The technology is required to run AI-powered supercomputers, which would otherwise simply freeze and become inoperative. Micron's Q2 revenue for 2026 amounted to $23.9 billion, representing a 196% increase over the same quarter last year. In addition, the company's Q3 revenue estimate for the following quarter is projected to rise to $33 billion.

This trend is having a direct impact on everyday consumers. Chip manufacturers, by redirecting a large part of their capacity to the production of AI chips, are diverting resources and efforts away from the production of conventional DRAM and NAND memory, which are used in laptops, desktop PCs and smartphones, pushing up prices globally. Dell CEO Michael Dell has publicly warned that demand for these devices is expected to continue to outpace current supply until at least 2028, further exacerbating DRAM and NAND shortages and price hikes. In sum, the tech market is likely to become considerably more expensive for consumers over the next two years.