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In the midst of a rather controversial season for the memory segment that has seen Samsung battle rumors that it plans to shift to different manufacturing technologies, Rosenblatt is out with an optimistic analyst note for memory maker Micron. The note comes as chip stocks pare their gains after recent highs set by NVIDIA, and Intel makes inroads into U.S. chip funding by gaining access to billions of dollars of chip subsidies.
Rosenblatt’s latest share price target for Micron is $225, as today’s raise marks a strong 60% jump over the firm’s previous target of $140. On the back of this optimism is the research firm’s belief that the structural nature of the memory industry coupled with the evolving needs of artificial intelligence chips can create an up-cycle in the memory industry.
Micron Set To Rapidly Capture Up To 20% Market Share In HBM Industry Believes Rosenblatt
While most of the focus surrounding artificial intelligence chips, such as NVIDIA’s Blackwell accelerator, is on their processing and computing capabilities, without proper memory chips, accelerators can not provide the performance punch needed to run complex A.I. models such as ChatGPT.
Naturally, since a handful of players also dominates the memory industry, this has meant that any one of these falling behind others leaves the market open for rivals to capture. A report from Reuters claimed earlier this month that Samsung was looking to shift to advanced memory manufacturing technologies, claims that the firm denied. This was followed by the Asian research firm TrendForce outlining that Samsung was neck to neck with Micron and SK hynix in providing NVIDIA with HBM 3e memory chips for upcoming product lineups.
Now, Rosenblatt has not only upgraded Micron’s share price target to $225 from $140, but shared that by the end of calendar year 2025, the firm will have captured at least 20% of the HBM memory market.
Since high end HBM3e memory chips can require as much as three times the wafers as traditional DRAM modules, Rosenblatt also believes that Micron’s wafer capacity will also see “low double-digit degradation, “as the firm struggles to simultaneously keep up with HBM3e and DRAM demand. Rosenblatt’s analysts suggest that advanced chips like NVIDIA’s Blackwell will require both these memory types, and a low supply can mean that chip manufacturers are eager to pay whatever prices are set for the memory chips.
This leads the firm to conclude that the memory cycle ushered in by A.I. products will “be the biggest in history” since the effects of A.I. on the computing industry are secular.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang also kept up with the view of A.I.’s secular impact at an analyst talk part of the firm’s latest GTC conference. Huang shared that at least $1 trillion of demand exists in the market simply in the form of existing data centers upgrading to A.I., with memory chips expected to play an equally important role in the latest wave of global computing upgrades in the post pandemic era.