Micron Technology continued to set fresh record highs on Monday, with its market capitalization surging to $1.33 trillion. In terms of news flow, the company announced a strategic collaboration and supply agreement with Anthropic covering memory and storage solutions, further reinforcing the AI storage narrative.
The consecutive record highs have also objectively raised the bar for Micron’s upcoming earnings report, which is expected to exceed consensus estimates.
June 22 (Reuters) – During Monday’s U.S. trading session, Micron Technology, a leading memory chipmaker, opened higher and extended its record-breaking rally. The company’s market value reached $1.33 trillion (equivalent to over RMB 9 trillion), closely trailing SK Hynix, which also hit a record high on the same day.
(Source: TradingView)
On the news front, the company and Anthropic announced a strategic agreement encompassing AI architecture design for memory and storage, supply-demand cooperation, and the enterprise-level deployment of Claude within Micron’s internal operations.
As a key focus of the collaboration, Micron and Anthropic will analyze the performance of memory and storage subsystems under various workloads and how they interact across the full infrastructure technology stack. Micron expects this work to drive improvements in memory and storage performance, energy efficiency, and “token economics” for Anthropic’s AI infrastructure.
As a core hardware supplier in the compute economy, only Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix currently offer the combined product portfolio of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), DRAM, and enterprise-grade SSDs globally.
Tom Brown, co-founder and chief computing officer at Anthropic, stated that Anthropic’s compute strategy depends on every layer of the technology stack being optimized, with memory and storage being central to the efficiency of Claude’s training and serving. Partnering with Micron allows Anthropic to tightly optimize these systems around its own workloads while securing the necessary supply. As demand for Claude grows, this represents Anthropic’s long-term approach to scaling compute capacity.
Building on the technical collaboration, Anthropic also announced a memory and storage supply agreement with Micron covering the company’s data center product portfolio.
As for Micron’s investment in Anthropic, the AI giant mentioned this in its May announcement. Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix all participated as strategic infrastructure partners in Anthropic’s $65 billion funding round, which valued the company at $965 billion.
The further advance on Monday has raised the bar for Micron Technology’s post-market earnings report on Wednesday to “exceed expectations.”
Brokerages Stifel and Wedbush raised their price targets on Micron to $1,500 and $1,300, respectively, last week, while Micron had already touched the $1,200 level on Monday.
UBS’s trading desk also warned last week of the risks in the “AI crowding” trade.
They wrote: “The market backdrop, along with the narrative surrounding the semiconductor AI trade, has now created an extreme and increasingly binary framework: either ‘winners’ or ‘losers.’ For any asset in between, there is almost no room left for discussion regarding its investment value.”
UBS’s conclusion was also direct: “When fund flows become narrow, market breadth weakens, leverage rises, sentiment turns one-sided, and the rationale for holding these assets increasingly becomes a self-reinforcing loop, it is usually not the time to add risk.”
