Micron Jumps 8% as Citi Raises Target Ahead of March 18 Earnings

The Catalyst

Citi raised its Micron price target from $385 to $430 on Monday, reiterating a Buy rating and citing tightening DRAM and HBM supply dynamics heading into the March 18 fiscal Q2 report. Bank of America had already lifted its own target from $300 to $400 earlier in the week. The upgrade landed on a day when the entire memory complex caught a bid — SanDisk ripped 11.6% and Western Digital posted strong gains alongside MU, signaling broad sector conviction rather than a single-name story.

The Street is now stacking into memory ahead of earnings season with 35 of 38 tracked analysts holding Buy or Strong Buy ratings on MU. Channel checks cited by multiple desks point to tight DRAM and HBM supply, locked HBM deals for the full year, and the potential for a double-beat quarter.

The Earnings Setup

Micron reports fiscal Q2 results on March 18. Management's own guidance implies roughly $18.7 billion in quarterly revenue — a 132% increase from the year-ago period — with non-GAAP EPS of $8.42 and gross margins around 68%. That margin figure alone tells the story: Micron printed 56% gross margins in Q1 FY2026 on $13.6 billion in revenue, and the guide implies another 1,200 basis points of expansion in a single quarter.

Polymarket currently prices the probability of an earnings beat at 97.7%. The question for the market isn't whether Micron beats — it's by how much, and whether the Q3 guide signals further acceleration or the first signs of a plateau.

HBM and the Supply Lock

The structural driver underneath the price action is high-bandwidth memory. Micron's entire 2026 HBM supply is sold out under locked agreements, de-risking revenue and giving the company the kind of forward visibility that commodity chipmakers almost never get. NVIDIA's Rubin platform requires 300GB of DRAM per chip — nearly 4x the H100's 80GB — and that demand curve is what exhausted supply.

Micron recently began sampling a 256GB SOCAMM2 LPDRAM module co-designed with NVIDIA, and HBM4 production is set to ramp in Q2 2026. The company hiked capex to $20 billion to keep pace, including a $100 billion fab complex breaking ground in upstate New York and a $1.8 billion acquisition of Powerchip's Taiwan fab. Counterpoint Research estimates that server memory prices could double by year-end — a pricing tailwind Micron is positioned to capture at scale.

What March 18 Puts in Play

The risk into earnings is straightforward: at $391 and a 68% guided gross margin, the market is already pricing a company deep in a profit supercycle. Any softness in the Q3 guide — particularly around HBM4 ramp timing or conventional DRAM pricing — would give shorts something to work with for the first time in months.

But the bull case is equally clear. If Micron prints above guide and raises Q3, the stock re-rates toward BofA's $400 target in the near term and Citi's $430 becomes the new floor. With 2026 HBM supply locked and AI infrastructure spend showing no signs of cooling, the March 18 call is less about whether the business is executing and more about how fast the market is willing to reprice a memory company trading like a software compounder.

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