Micron is up 224% this year. An analyst just said it has a lot further to run.
TD Cowen more than doubled its price target on the chipmaker, lifting it from $660 to $1,500.
A price target is just where an analyst thinks a stock will trade in a year. TD Cowen's new one says Micron can climb even after a 224% jump.
The reason comes down to memory chips. Micron makes DRAM, the chips that hold data while a computer is working.
AI systems need huge amounts of them, so demand is now outrunning supply. The stock is up about 751% over the past year, and the company is worth around $1.2 trillion.
The stock trades near $1,074 and rose about 9% on the news. Sales jumped about 86% over the past year.
TD Cowen expects Micron to earn around $150 per share in 2027. It's betting that strong chip prices last longer than the market figured.
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Memory chips have always been a brutal business. It works a lot like farming, where a shortage sends prices up, everyone plants more, and then prices crash.
TD Cowen's whole argument is that AI broke that cycle. The firm called memory's role in AI "structural rather than cyclical."
In plain terms, that means a steady need and not a passing spike. If that holds, the old rule about memory stocks may not apply this time.
TD Cowen has plenty of company on this call. RBC Capital sees $1,200, Wolfe Research sees $1,250, and Aletheia Capital goes all the way to $1,600.
When the targets all sit above today's price, the debate stops being whether Micron rises. It becomes how far.
Micron is also building for the future. It picked the engineering firm Bechtel to build a new memory plant in Clay, New York, where work started earlier this year.
Even TD Cowen admits the risk. In a normal cycle, a stock this hot would be near its top.
That's because memory stocks usually peak months before chip prices do. TD Cowen expects server chip prices to top out around the third quarter of this year.
The bull case isn't that Micron is cheap. It's that the rules that kept memory cheap just changed.
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