Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTDaniel Sparks, The Motley FoolFri, June 26, 2026 at 1:03 AM GMT+2 4 min readMemory chips rarely steal the spotlight from the processors they support. But Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) just posted a quarter big enough to do exactly that -- and the read-through may matter most for investors in Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), whose artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators are built around the very memory Micron is scrambling to supply.Micron's stock jumped about 16% as of this writing on the results. Nvidia's, oddly, slipped about 1.6% on the same day. But look past the one-day move, and Micron's report says something encouraging about how strong -- and how durable -- demand for AI chips looks heading into Nvidia's next chapter.Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »Imag source: Getty Images.A record quarter built on AI memoryMicron's fiscal third quarter of 2026 (the period ended May 28, 2026) was the biggest in the company's history. Revenue jumped 346% year over year to a record $41.46 billion, up from $9.30 billion a year ago, and climbed 74% from the prior quarter. Gross margin reached a record of about 85%, and non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings per share came in at $25.11.The engine behind those numbers is high-bandwidth memory (HBM) -- the dense, fast memory stacked alongside the processors inside AI servers. Micron's data center revenue hit about $25 billion in the quarter, and its newest HBM4 product has already shipped more than $1 billion, ramping about twice as fast as the prior generation. Management guided for fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $50 billion, which would be another 20% jump from the quarter it just reported.What stands out most isn't the size of the quarter -- it's how locked in the demand looks. Micron's entire 2026 supply of HBM is already sold out under multi-year, fixed-price agreements, and the company said it can currently fill only about half to two-thirds of what several of its key customers want."Micron's record fiscal Q3 financial results and even stronger outlook for Q4 reflect the strategic value of memory in the AI era," said CEO Sanjay Mehrotra in the company's fiscal third-quarter earnings release.What it means for NvidiaMicron's HBM gets stacked directly onto AI accelerators like Nvidia's Blackwell chips and the Vera Rubin platform set to ramp in the second half of this year. Micron is one of only a few companies in the world that can make it -- so when it says that memory is spoken for years in advance, it's effectively describing the order book for the chips the memory feeds.Terms and Privacy PolicyEU DSA contactPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info