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US chipmaker Micron’s logo hangs at the China International Import Expo held in Shanghai in November 2025. (Reuters/Yonhap)

US chipmaker Micron took the world by surprise on Wednesday (local time) by announcing earnings that far exceeded market expectations, proving that the artificial intelligence investment boom is fueling a semiconductor super cycle.
 
Expectations are high as South Korean companies such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are projected to showcase combined operating profits exceeding an unprecedented 200 trillion won in 2026.
 
Micron Technology announced that its revenue for the first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year (September to November 2025) totaled US$13.64 billion on Wednesday. This marked the largest quarterly revenue in the company’s history, showing a whopping increase of 56.6%, compared to the same period last year. This was also a 20.5% quarter-over-quarter increase.
 
The company’s first-quarter operating profit spiked 182.9% year-on-year and 68.2% quarter-on-quarter to US$6.14 billion. Micron’s adjusted earnings per share (EPS) were at US$4.78, with both revenue and EPS significantly exceeding Wall Street expectations.
 
Micron, the first major chipmaker to report earnings, is often dubbed the barometer for the global memory chip market. Severe shortages in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI data centers and general-purpose memory like DRAM have led to record-breaking performance from the company.
 
Sanjay Mehrotra, the CEO of Micron, stated during the earnings call that day that “sustained and strong industry demand, along with supply constraints, are contributing to tight market conditions, and we expect these conditions to persist beyond calendar 2026.” 

“In the medium term, we are only able to meet about 50% to two-thirds of our demand from several key customers,” he added. 
 
The statement demonstrates that the HBM supply slated for 2026 has already sold out, leading to a continuation of supply shortages in the foreseeable future.
 
Manish Bhatia, the executive vice president at Micron, seemed taken aback by this imbalance, saying that the current situation is “the most significant disconnect between demand and supply in terms of magnitude as well as time horizon that we’ve experienced in [his] 25 years in the industry.”
 
Micron anticipates continued rapid growth, expecting revenue of US$18.7 million for the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, a 37.1% increase from the first quarter. It also projected the HBM market to grow at an annual rate of approximately 40%, reaching US$100 billion by 2028. In response to this expansion in demand, Micron plans to increase its capital expenditure for fiscal year 2026 from US$18 billion to US$20 billion.
 
Revenue projections for Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the two companies competing for the top spot in the global memory market share, are being revised daily.
 
Investment companies, both international and domestic, believe that, despite concerns over an AI bubble, the two companies will ride a fully-fledged memory super cycle in 2026, with their combined annual operating profit reaching up to 200 trillion won.

The two rivals are accelerating their efforts as they jockey for the crown in the global memory market.

SK Hynix revealed Thursday that, out of all its competitors, it became the first to achieve Intel certification for a DDR5 server memory module with the highest capacity in the industry. The same day, Samsung Electronics announced that it developed a low-power server memory module called SOCAMM2, geared toward use in AI data centers, which have since been supplied to Nvidia.

By Park Jong-o, staff reporter

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