At the turn of the century, investors might have found the idea of a company reaching a $1 trillion market cap as fairly outlandish.
Today, there are over a dozen companies that make the claim, with the artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia now trading at a market cap of over $5 trillion. Unless valuations pull back sharply due to AI hitting a major roadblock, more companies are poised to surpass trillion-dollar market caps.
Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a “Double Down” signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same “Total Conviction” signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »
In fact, one just did. Meet this pick-and-shovel AI stock that just joined Meta Platforms, Tesla, and Broadcom in the $1 trillion club.
Understanding Micron’s role in AI
What an incredible run the computer memory company Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) has been on. The stock is up over 227% this year and over 867% in the past year (as of May 28).
The big reason Micron and a few other related stocks have surged is due to tremendous demand for memory, which has become a big part of the AI story. Chipmakers like Nvidia need memory to sit directly on their graphics processing units (GPUs), which are key for training large language models. Memory is needed to feed the GPUs with data.
As Nvidia and other chipmakers have built more advanced GPUs and scaled GPU clusters, they need more memory to process data faster. There are different types of memory, but Micron makes a type called dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), which was commonly used in older technologies like computers and cellphones.
More recently, however, Micron has been developing a more complex memory product called high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which essentially stacks multiple DRAM chips. This is better for GPUs because it reduces the distance data has to travel to reach them.
In March, Micron announced that it had designed a new HBM model called the HBM4 with 36 gigabytes of 12-Gi memory, specifically made for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform.
According to the market research firm Counterpoint, Micron held 23% of the global DRAM market share by revenue at the end of 2025, behind only Samsung (36%) and SK Hynix (32%). In the global HBM market, Micron had 21% market share at the end of last year, still behind SK Hynix (57%) and Samsung (22%).
However, Micron’s share had more than doubled from just 9% at the end of 2024.
