Micron booked $54.2 billion in one quarter. Its guide for the next one is $61.5 billion

Micron Technology reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $54.23 billion on Wednesday afternoon. A year earlier, the same quarter produced $11.32 billion. The quarter before this one produced $41.46 billion.

Analysts had modeled roughly $50.75 billion in revenue and $31.45 in adjusted earnings per share. Micron delivered $54.23 billion and $33.42. GAAP net income was $37.70 billion, or $32.87 per diluted share; on a non-GAAP basis, $38.40 billion.

Chip futures took the number as confirmation rather than surprise, and that is the part worth sitting with. Memory pricing has become the most legible scoreboard the AI buildout has, because unlike data-center capex announcements it settles in contracts and shows up in a quarterly income statement.

Where the money came from

DRAM revenue was a record $39.8 billion, up 343% from a year earlier and 73% of the company's total. Sequentially DRAM grew 27%, with bit shipments up only a mid-single-digit percentage and prices up a high-teens percentage, which management attributed to tight industry conditions.

Read that sentence again, because it describes the entire cycle: Micron shipped a few percent more memory and charged nearly 20% more for it. Volume is not what changed. Pricing is.

For the full fiscal year, revenue was $133.2 billion, up 256% and about three and a half times the prior year's record. Gross margin reached 81.1%, a 40-percentage-point improvement over fiscal 2025. Earnings per share rose 811% to $75.52. DRAM revenue for the year passed $100 billion on its own.

Operating cash flow in the quarter was $43.97 billion, against $5.73 billion in the same quarter last year. Capital expenditures, net, were $10.77 billion in the quarter and $27.37 billion for the year, leaving adjusted free cash flow of $33.20 billion for the quarter. Micron closed the year with $73.48 billion in cash, marketable investments and restricted cash, and declared a quarterly dividend of $0.15 per share payable October 29.

The forward numbers are the news

Guidance for fiscal Q1 2027 is $61.5 billion in revenue, plus or minus $1.5 billion — another 13% sequential step up from a quarter that was already a record. Non-GAAP gross margin is guided to roughly 86.25%, up from 81.1% for the year just ended, and non-GAAP EPS to $38.15 plus or minus $1.00.

A hardware company guiding to a gross margin in the mid-80s is the clearest statement available about who currently has pricing power in the AI supply chain.

What management committed to

On the call, Micron said high-bandwidth memory revenue grew faster than total company revenue during the quarter as shipments ramped across a widening customer base, and that the company has completed agreements covering the vast majority of its calendar 2027 HBM bit supply at significant year-over-year price increases — narrowing the margin gap between HBM and conventional DRAM.

Management also said it has signed 26 long-term supply agreements in total, with remaining performance obligations of approximately $150 billion. That figure is a backlog, not revenue, and it depends on customers taking delivery as scheduled. But it is the number that reframes the bear case on memory: the historical risk in this industry has always been that a pricing peak arrives, capacity lands, and margins unwind within two quarters. Contracts already written for 2027 push that question further out.

The rest of the chip tape

Micron shares were close to flat in Thursday's pre-market after the move that came in after-hours trade, which is common when a result lands at the high end of expectations that had already been marked up. The read-through showed up elsewhere instead.

Synopsys guided fiscal 2027 adjusted earnings to $19.04-$19.12 per share against roughly $17.32 expected, and revenue to $11.10-$11.20 billion against about $10.73 billion expected; the stock was up roughly 1.4%-2.5% before the open after closing Wednesday as one of the S&P 500's best performers, up 4.78% to $434.94.

Vicor raised its third-quarter sequential revenue growth guidance to above 30% from above 20%, citing higher vertical power-delivery royalties, and jumped about 10%-12% to around $318-$324 pre-market. Power delivery for AI racks is a smaller, less-watched link in the same chain.

Alphabet, meanwhile, advanced about 2.3% after introducing its Gemini 4 flagship model — the demand side of the same trade.

What to watch from here

Three things determine whether this cycle holds. Whether HBM pricing in those 2027 contracts survives contact with new capacity. Whether the AI capex that funds the orders keeps being approved as long-term borrowing costs sit at 24-year highs. And whether memory's margin expansion stays concentrated in DRAM or spreads back into NAND.

Invested Alpha does not make recommendations. What this quarter establishes is narrower than a view on the stock: the memory cycle is, for now, still being set by supply the industry has already sold.