Micron Earnings: Record $54.2B Quarter on AI Memory Demand

Micron Technology reported fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 revenue of $54.2 billion, up 379% from a year earlier and up 31% sequentially, as AI-driven demand for DRAM and HBM pushed the memory maker's gross margin to a record 87.0% (non-GAAP) and sent its guidance for the current quarter to $61.5 billion. The results, posted September 30, 2026, confirm what buyers of PCs, graphics cards and servers have been feeling all year: memory is in the tightest supply cycle in the industry's history, and Micron says it expects things to get tighter still in calendar 2027 and 2028.

What Micron actually reported

Micron's fiscal fourth quarter covers the three months that ended September 3, 2026. According to the company's earnings press release filed with the SEC and the prepared remarks posted to Micron's investor relations site, consolidated revenue hit $54.2 billion, Micron's sixth consecutive quarterly revenue record. GAAP net income was $37.70 billion ($32.87 per diluted share); non-GAAP net income was $38.40 billion ($33.42 per diluted share), up 33% from the prior quarter.

For the full fiscal year, Micron reported revenue of $133.2 billion, up 256% from fiscal 2025's $37.38 billion, with full-year non-GAAP gross margin of 81.1% — a 40-percentage-point improvement year over year — and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $75.52, up 811% from fiscal 2025. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra called fiscal 2026 "an outstanding year," adding in the prepared remarks that "as strong as fiscal 2026 was, we expect fiscal 2027 to be even better. Industry demand has strengthened since our last earnings call, and we expect memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026."

DRAM and NAND, by the numbers

Micron doesn't report a simple two-line DRAM/NAND split in its press release anymore — it reports four business units instead (more on that below) — but its CFO, Mark Murphy, broke out product-level DRAM and NAND figures on the earnings call, and Micron's fiscal 2026 Form 10-K confirms the annual totals.

On the call, Murphy said DRAM bit shipments were up in the "mid-single-digit percentage range" sequentially while DRAM prices rose in the "high-teens percentage range," driven by tight industry conditions. NAND bit shipments rose roughly 10% sequentially while NAND prices rose roughly 30%. For the full fiscal year, Micron's 10-K puts DRAM revenue at $100.68 billion (up 252% from fiscal 2025) and NAND revenue at $31.79 billion (up 274%) — the first time Micron's DRAM business alone has topped $100 billion in a fiscal year.

Business-unit breakdown: data center is now a third of revenue

Micron groups its results into four business units, and the shift toward data-center and AI customers is stark in the fiscal Q4 figures.

Micron also flagged that data-center SSD revenue reached nearly $10 billion in the quarter — more than ten times the year-ago figure and over two-thirds of total NAND revenue — as AI servers increasingly use flash for "KV cache offload" (storing intermediate data from large AI models) and as SSDs displace hard drives in some data-center roles.

Why margins keep climbing

Micron's consolidated non-GAAP gross margin rose to 87.0% in fiscal Q4, up 210 basis points sequentially, which the company attributed primarily to higher pricing and strong execution, partially offset by product mix. Operating income reached $44.6 billion non-GAAP, for an operating margin of 82.3% — up 47 percentage points from a year earlier. Micron's effective tax rate for the quarter was 15%.

Notably, CFO Mark Murphy told investors that fiscal Q1 2027 is expected to be "the floor for gross margins in fiscal 2027," not a peak — margins are guided to stay roughly flat near 86.25% in the near term because of one-time inventory and incentive-compensation costs, then to climb through the rest of fiscal 2027 "with a more moderate rate of price increases."

The HBM story: 2027 supply is largely already spoken for

The highest-margin, fastest-growing part of Micron's business right now is high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked DRAM used in AI accelerators from Nvidia, AMD and others. In the prepared remarks, Mehrotra said: "In HBM, our revenue in fiscal Q4 2026 grew faster than total company revenue in the quarter, as we ramp HBM shipments across a growing number of customers. We have completed agreements for the vast majority of our calendar 2027 HBM bit supply with significant price increases year over year, narrowing the gross margin gap with conventional DRAM."

That's Micron's own, precise language — "vast majority," not literally "sold out" — but the practical effect reported by the company is the same: most of next year's HBM output already has a buyer and a higher price attached before 2027 has even started. Micron also said it is "proud to be working with NVIDIA on the industry's first custom-HBM4E implementation," referred to as NVHBM, aimed at Nvidia's next-generation GPU and NVLink Fusion platforms. Management added that it expects industry HBM bit shipments to keep growing faster than conventional DRAM through calendar 2028.

What it means for RAM, SSD and PC prices

Micron's numbers help explain why DRAM and NAND flash prices have been climbing across the PC, laptop and console markets this year. On the earnings call, management said it expects the industry as a whole — not just Micron — to remain supply-constrained in both DRAM and NAND through calendar 2027 and 2028. For DRAM, Micron expects industry bit-shipment growth to slow to the "low-20s percentage range" in calendar 2027 and 2028, even as demand keeps climbing; for NAND, it expects industry bit shipments to grow in the "mid-20s percentage range" in those same years, again with the industry staying supply-constrained.

CFO Mark Murphy was blunt about the imbalance: "The structural gap between DRAM supply and demand growth rates is resulting in ongoing supply tightness... Even with additional industry DRAM cleanroom space plans, with robust demand trends including new upside requests from customers, we do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance." In practice, that means consumer buyers of PC memory, graphics cards and prebuilt systems should not expect DRAM or NAND prices to ease in the near term — Micron is prioritizing capital spending toward the new cleanroom capacity needed to catch up, with first output from new fabs not landing until 2027 and 2028 at the earliest (see below).

PC and mobile buyers are feeling it too

Micron's commentary wasn't limited to data centers. On the call, management said PC and mobile industry revenue is on track to keep growing this calendar year, "driven by strength at the premium end of the market," even as overall unit shipments in both categories could decline by double digits. The company said OEMs continue adding AI features to flagship PCs and phones, which pushes those devices toward higher DRAM and NAND content per unit — and, combined with Micron's own 1-gamma (1γ) DRAM node making up nearly half of its Mobile and Client Business Unit's fiscal Q4 revenue, that premium shift is one more source of upward pressure on component costs that eventually reaches consumer PC and phone prices. Micron separately pointed to a newer category — "physical AI," covering autonomous vehicles and eventually humanoid robots — as a future demand driver, noting that Level 4-and-higher autonomous vehicles typically require more than 200GB of memory and multiple terabytes of storage, an order of magnitude above today's semi-autonomous vehicles.

Strategic customer agreements and a $150 billion backlog

A big part of why Micron sounds confident about years, not just quarters, of strong demand is its growing book of strategic customer agreements (SCAs) — multi-year, take-or-pay contracts. Micron says it has now signed 26 SCAs, which it estimates represent more than 35% of its revenue through 2030, with remaining performance obligations (RPO) of approximately $150 billion. Three-quarters of that estimated SCA revenue has a defined pricing framework, mostly with floor-and-ceiling pricing bands; financial commitments from customers under these agreements have grown to $32 billion, the vast majority in the form of cash deposits.

Micron is plowing the resulting cash into new manufacturing capacity: a new fab in New York (first wafers expected in 2030), its ID1 fab in Idaho (wafer output targeted for mid-calendar-2027), ID2 (late calendar 2028), a DRAM fab expansion in Japan (late calendar 2028), product shipments from its Tongluo facility in Taiwan (mid-calendar-2027), and an HBM advanced-packaging facility in Singapore targeting initial output in early calendar 2027. Micron ended the quarter with $73.48 billion in cash, marketable investments and restricted cash, and a net cash position of $68.3 billion after reducing debt by roughly $500 million.

Guidance: an even bigger quarter ahead

For fiscal Q1 2027 (the quarter now underway), Micron is guiding to revenue of $61.5 billion, plus or minus $1.5 billion — which would be another record and roughly 13% higher at the midpoint than the quarter just reported. The company guided non-GAAP gross margin to approximately 86.25% and non-GAAP diluted EPS to $38.15, plus or minus $1.00, on a projected share count of about 1.15 billion shares. Management said it expects fiscal 2027 as a whole to be "another record year, with sequential revenue growth each quarter," alongside higher incentive-compensation costs and roughly $2.5 billion in additional operating expenses, largely for R&D.

How this compares to Samsung, SK Hynix and the rest of the memory market

Micron's results land in the same stretch of 2026 earnings season that saw Samsung Electronics post a record quarterly profit on AI memory demand and SK Hynix report a 632% jump in profit to a record high, as all three of the world's major memory makers ride the same wave of AI-driven DRAM and HBM demand. The pattern extends beyond memory chips, too — Seagate also posted record profit this cycle on surging AI hard-drive demand, underscoring just how broadly AI data-center buildouts are reshaping storage and memory markets at once.

What to watch next

Three things worth tracking heading into Micron's fiscal Q1 2027 report (expected in December 2026): whether the $61.5 billion guidance midpoint holds or gets topped again, as every quarter has for the past year and a half; whether HBM4 ramp commentary shows further narrowing of HBM's margin gap with conventional DRAM, as Mehrotra described; and whether new cleanroom capacity coming online from Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix through 2027–2028 starts to show up in calmer DRAM and NAND spot pricing, or whether AI-driven demand keeps outrunning it, as Micron's own CFO has said the company currently has no visibility into when that will happen.

For background on the technology driving this cycle, see Wikipedia's overview of High Bandwidth Memory and Micron Technology's corporate history.

Written byMara Lindqvist

Mara Lindqvist edits the hardware desk. She covers graphics cards, processors, memory and storage, the foundries and chip designers behind them, and what the numbers on a spec sheet mean for people choosing a PC. Specifications in her stories come from manufacturer spec pages and datasheets.

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