BofA Resets Micron's Target to $950 from $500, Stacking Onto Deutsche Bank's $1,000 as Cash Cracks a Fresh 52-Week High

The BofA Reset

BofA lifted its Micron target to $950 from $500 on May 13, maintaining a Buy rating and working a sum-of-parts model that puts roughly $240 a share on the AI/HBM business at 27x forward earnings and about $710 a share on traditional memory at 3.1x forward book. The framing — that memory supply elasticity is now "structurally lower" given capital, packaging, and power constraints — is the same one that has been driving the stock for six weeks. What's new is the magnitude. A near-doubling of the Street target from a top-five sell-side desk is not the kind of revision that fits inside a normal product cycle. BofA is also calling for earnings to stay "relatively stable through CY28," which is sell-side shorthand for the cyclical pricing peak not rolling over the way memory peaks historically have.

Why Wall Street Is Compressing Resets Into Eight-Day Windows

This is the second Street-high move on MU in three trading days. Deutsche Bank's Melissa Weathers took her target to $1,000 from $550 on Monday, modeling against a projected 2026 EPS of $46.50 and writing that AI is "fundamentally changing many of the cyclical dynamics in the memory industry." The binding constraint underneath the reset cluster is the strike timer. Samsung Electronics' largest union has reaffirmed an 18-day general walkout starting May 21 after government mediation collapsed, with TrendForce modeling 3-4% of global DRAM output and 2-3% of NAND at risk and multi-week recovery scenarios if it runs full duration. Eight calendar days separate the BofA print from the start of that stoppage. The desks willing to reset are willing because the worst-case is narrowly forward-dated and the best-case is already in motion — Samsung itself has warned of industry-wide memory price surges into 2026, and Micron is the only sized DRAM supplier that doesn't have a union sitting on its Pyeongtaek line.

The Perp Has Caught Up to Cash

The 20-hour leg captured a move from yesterday's roughly $717 area to today's $813.50 print, with cash MU trading an intraday 52-week high of $818.67 and last marked $811.87. The perp now carries roughly a $2 premium versus the ~$32 gap we tracked overnight. The basis closed from the cash side, exactly the way it does when leveraged longs were right about the catalyst they were paying carry into. With $158M in 24h Hyperliquid perp volume and 10x leverage available, the next reflexive level to watch is whether spot can hold above $800 into Friday's close — a level that, until Monday, didn't exist. If it does, the question stops being whether the $1,000 prints and starts being how the Street resets the third leg above it.