MU Holds $800 as Trump Lands in Beijing With Mehrotra and BofA Reprints at $950

The Plane Is on the Ground

Trump arrived in Beijing on the morning of May 13 for two days of talks with Xi Jinping, and Sanjay Mehrotra is on the executive list that flew in with him. The full delegation includes Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Larry Fink, Jensen Huang, Kelly Ortberg, Dina Powell McCormick, Jane Fraser and executives from Qualcomm, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Illumina, Mastercard and Visa. Mehrotra's invitation was reported out of Boise the day before departure. The substantive read is narrow: HBM and high-density DRAM are the binding constraint on any China-side AI compute concession, and Micron is one of three suppliers globally that can fill an order at the scale the summit is implicitly pricing. Trade, Taiwan, AI and Iran are the four pillars of the agenda, and three of them are memory-adjacent. That optionality is not modeled anywhere on the sell side, which is part of why the tape is refusing to fade post-upgrade.

BofA Closes the $450 Gap

Bank of America raised its Micron price target to $950 from $500 this morning, keeping a Buy rating and calling out an AI data-center memory demand-supply imbalance that the prior model had badly undercounted. The reset stacks directly onto Deutsche Bank's Street-high $1,000 from Monday, and Bernstein's $510 is now the visible laggard on the sheet. The underlying setup is not speculative: Tom's Hardware and Gartner have DRAM contract prices rising 58 to 63 percent this quarter and 125 percent for the full year, Micron's entire 2026 output is sold out, and last quarter's print was $24 billion in revenue with earnings up 771 percent year over year. The $500 anchor was a relic of a different cycle.

Eight Days to Samsung

Samsung's union is demanding 15 percent of operating profit as bonus and has set a May 21 general-walkout deadline if no deal lands. TrendForce models a sustained disruption at three to four percent of global DRAM and roughly three percent of NAND, with disproportionate impact on HBM stacks used for AI accelerators. Micron is the cleanest single-name expression of that supply hole — SK Hynix is closer to the strike geography, and the U.S.-listed perp is the most liquid way to play it overnight. Eight calendar days is also the window between today's Beijing arrival and the strike start, which is why the bid is refusing to give up $800 even after the analyst event already cleared.

The Perp Print

The HIP-3 contract is at $799.9, up 11.42 percent over 22 hours on $174.7 million in volume. Cash hit an intraday high of $815.19 — a fresh 52-week — before pulling back to roughly $791. The roughly $30 overnight premium that defined the perp print earlier in the week has fully compressed; the perp is now tracking cash inside a dollar or two rather than front-running it. That is the technical signal worth watching: when leverage stops paying up for a name this hot, either the cash bid is about to catch up to the futures view (bullish through summit week) or the marginal leverage long has already paid for the move and the next leg requires real flow. The May 21 strike date and the Xi summit communiqué are the two binary events that resolve which one it is.