US Stock Market Move | Micron Technology, Inc. (MU.US) rose nearly 5% in pre-market trading as board members purchased $7.8 million in stock.

On Friday, Micron Technology, Inc. (MU.US) rose nearly 5% in pre-market trading to $352.91. In terms of news, Micron Technology, Inc. revealed that its director Teyin Liu purchased 23,200 shares of Micron Technology, Inc. common stock for $7.8 million. The purchase price ranged from $336.63 to $337.50 per share. After the transaction, Teyin Liu directly owns 25,910 shares of Micron Technology, Inc. stock. This is the first insider buying by the company since 2022. Market research firm Counterpoint Research stated that we are currently in a "super bull market" phase, with market strength surpassing the historical highs of 2018. The price of storage chips is expected to rise by 40% to 50% in the first quarter of 2026, followed by a further increase of around 20% in the second quarter. The demand for high-bandwidth memory has surged due to AI large-scale model training, with the memory requirements of a single AI server reaching 8 to 10 times that of a regular server. The three major storage giants, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, have shifted over 40% of their advanced DRAM capacity to HBM production, squeezing consumer memory capacity and causing supply chain shortages. Prices of certain server memory products have significantly increased, with the total price of a box of 256GB DDR5 server memory exceeding the value of some city properties. Analysts at Citigroup believe that due to the proliferation of AI smart agents and the surge in AI CPU memory demand, storage chip prices will experience an uncontrollable increase in 2026. They have revised their expectations for the average selling price (ASP) of DRAM in 2026 from an initial estimate of 53% to 88%, and for NAND from 44% to 74%. Nomura analysts predict that the "super cycle" in the storage industry that began in the second half of 2025 will continue at least until 2027, with meaningful new supply not expected until early 2028 at the earliest. Nomura analysts suggest that investors should continue to overweight storage leaders in 2026 and focus on the "price-profit-valuation" paradigm for storage chip investments in 2026, rather than solely focusing on HBM as a single theme.