Micron Technology shares climbed nearly 5% on Monday after the memory maker unveiled a strategic deal with Anthropic covering chip design, long-term supply, and an equity investment in the AI lab. The announcement landed two days before Micron reports fiscal third-quarter results, sharpening investor focus on how AI memory demand is feeding the company's growth. Micron announced the partnership on Monday, framing the tie-up as a bridge between frontier AI models and the design of memory hardware. The two firms will co-engineer memory and storage subsystems tuned for AI training and inference, with the deal locking in a multi-year supply arrangement across Micron's data center portfolio covering high-bandwidth memory, DRAM, and solid-state drives.
Micron Technology stock has climbed 298% this year, with the stock now trading above $1,192, extending a rally built on booming AI memory demand. According to reports from boerse-global.de, Deutsche Bank raised its price target by 50% to $1,500 from a prior $1,000, maintaining its Buy rating and pointing to AI-driven DRAM demand and favorable pricing conditions expected to persist well into 2028 and potentially beyond. The move was followed by TD Cowen analyst Krish Sankar matching that figure, citing a projected 2027 earnings per share of roughly $150. RBC Capital separately raised its target to $1,200, citing a DRAM upcycle now in its twelfth consecutive quarter, while Citi also lifted its price objective, pointing to ongoing DRAM supply tightness. Wolfe Research also increased its target to $1,250, bringing the total to at least six banks raising targets within a single week ahead of Micron's June 24 earnings announcement.
Micron also took a strategic stake in Anthropic's Series H round, joining Samsung and SK hynix as named infrastructure backers of Anthropic. The partnership gives Anthropic committed components as Claude usage keeps growing, with the lab's run-rate revenue crossing $47 billion in May and its latest raise valuing it at $965 billion. Inside its own walls, Micron uses Claude to accelerate engineering and coding work, with Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer at Anthropic, stating that "Our compute strategy depends on getting every layer of the stack right, and memory and storage are central to how efficiently we can train and serve Claude… As demand for Claude grows, this is how we scale our compute for the long term." The supply guarantee carries weight given Anthropic's scale, with the deal hedging against a market where AI chips are scarce.
The stock's performance has significantly outpaced Wall Street consensus, with the average Wall Street price target standing at roughly $829 according to consensus calculations — well below the current equivalent of about $1,192. As reported by boerse-global.de, this gap is a rare warning sign: the equity market has moved ahead of the spreadsheet, betting that a permanent shift in memory economics will justify a premium that no historical model can capture. The core thesis centers on artificial intelligence workloads consuming memory at a rate the industry has never seen, with Micron's dominant position in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and DRAM turning it into a linchpin of AI infrastructure. Institutions have taken notice: Graham Capital Management and Wellington Management both built out their positions in the fourth quarter, and large investors now control roughly 80% of Micron's outstanding shares. The profit math is equally dramatic, with gross margins projected to exceed 80% by fiscal 2027, while earnings per share could explode to around $160 — numbers that would have seemed absurd during the industry's last downturn.
The coming earnings report on June 24 represents a defining moment, with consensus revenue projections at around $34.4 billion compared with just $9.3 billion a year earlier, and whisper numbers on the Street having crept above $35 billion. According to boerse-global.de, if management delivers a beat and a confident outlook, the stock could challenge its all-time high above $1,130. However, the first line of support sits near the 50-day moving average at around $1,020 if guidance disappoints. Morgan Stanley has warned that AI-driven price pressure on memory is already spilling from data centers into the broader device economy, where manufacturers are being forced to absorb higher costs. If smartphone and PC makers push back, delay launches, or redesign around expensive memory, the scarcity story could turn political and commercial. The market has already embraced the message with fervor, with the stock climbing from a 52-week low of €90.64 to nearly €915, a tenfold gain, and Micron's market capitalization briefly crossing the $1 trillion threshold — a milestone unthinkable when investors were fixated on spot prices and inventory corrections.
