Micron generated $54.23 billion in revenue in its fiscal Q4 2026, up 4.8X year on year, with net income rising 12X to $37.7 billion — numbers that make a twelve-high HBM4 stack, at roughly $62,500 to $75,000 per troy ounce equivalent, worth 15 to 18 times the price of gold.

Operating income reached $43.75 billion, nearly 12X the year-ago quarter, and the company converted 69.5 percent of revenue to the bottom line. Micron ended the quarter with $73.45 billion in cash — up 7.6X — yet spent only $10.77 billion on capital expenditure, a deliberate restraint aimed at avoiding the oversupply that has historically crushed memory pricing.

The GenAI buildout underpins the results. Without the high-bandwidth stacked DRAM that Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix produce, the analyst commentary on which this report draws argues, the AI accelerator business at Nvidia and AMD could not have scaled as it has.

Where the money came from

• DRAM: $39.77 billion in sales, up 4.4X year on year
• NAND flash: $14.1 billion, up 6.2X — Micron's fastest-growing line
• Cloud Memory business unit (HBM-dominated): $16.28 billion, up 3.6X, with 76 percent operating margin
• Core Datacenter unit: just over $18 billion, up 11X
• Total datacenter revenue: $34.29 billion, up 5.6X, growing 35.6 percent sequentially

CFO Mark Murphy told analysts DRAM bit shipments rose by a single-digit percentage in the quarter while prices climbed in the "high teens percentage range." Flash bits shipped rose 10 percent with 30 percent price increases — evidence that pricing power, not just volume, is driving the P&L.

Micron no longer breaks out HBM separately, but the source's estimates put HBM at roughly $14.33 billion in the quarter, up 7.6X, with high-capacity server DIMMs and LPDDR together adding an estimated $8.05 billion, up 6.1X.

What did Micron say about 2027 supply?

CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said Micron has "completed agreements for the vast majority of our calendar 2027 HBM bit supply with significant price increases year over year, narrowing the gross margin gap with conventional DRAM."

The HBM4 ramp is proceeding on schedule, Mehrotra added, and the company is working with Nvidia on the industry's first custom HBM4E implementation, NVHBM, destined for next-generation GPUs and NVLink Fusion platforms.

Mehrotra also signaled that memory and flash supply will be tighter in calendar 2027 and 2028 than in 2026. DRAM bit shipments grow in the mid-20s percent range this calendar year but only in the low 20s in 2027 and 2028. Flash flips the pattern: low-20s growth in 2026, mid-20s in the following two years, because NAND capacity is cheaper and faster to add than DRAM.

Expanding HBM capacity is getting harder, not easier. Taller DRAM stacks running at higher speeds carry higher risk of manufacturing defects — a problem that will intensify with HBM4E and HBM5, burning through more DRAM wafers per good stack. Micron said fiscal 2027 capex will rise, with the extra spending aimed at DRAM output.

Customers are paying up front

To secure supply, customers have handed Micron $32 billion in prepayments. The company has signed 26 supplier agreements covering roughly 35 percent of revenue through fiscal 2030, and Mehrotra said agreements will eventually represent about half of sales. Micron's remaining performance obligations stand at $150 billion — and that figure covers only deals with fixed price floors and committed volumes.

Can China change the picture?

CTO Scott DeBoer told Wall Street analysts Micron remains two generations ahead of ChangXin Memory Technologies, China's indigenous DRAM maker, and intends to keep that gap. CXMT raised $8.6 billion in its July IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange — a fraction of the profits its rivals now earn each quarter — but China's push to supply its own memory and sell it globally is a matter of when, not if.

For fiscal Q1 2027, Micron guided to $61.5 billion in revenue, plus or minus $1.5 billion — 13 percent sequential growth and 4.5X the $13.64 billion of a year earlier. With 2027 HBM prices locked at significant increases and supply deliberately tight through at least 2028, Micron's pricing power shows no near-term sign of eroding.