Micron's stock is on the rise. Even Apple isn't safe from ballooning memory-chip costs.

By Britney Nguyen

Demand for memory chips will continue to outpace supply in the near term despite efforts to add manufacturing capacity, an analyst says

Micron and other memory and storage stocks rose Thursday.

Shares of Micron Technology and related stocks rose Thursday after Apple acknowledged that it isn't immune to surging prices for memory and storage chips.

Micron's stock (MU) gained 8.7%, while Seagate Technology (STX) edged 0.4% higher. Western Digital's stock (WDC) rose almost 5% and Sandisk's stock (SNDK) jumped 11.5%.

In an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal published late Wednesday, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook said that "price increases are unavoidable." The sentiment helped lift overseas-listed shares of South Korean memory makers SK Hynix (KR:000660) and Samsung Electronics (KR:005930).

The iPhone maker said it plans to raise prices to absorb the rising costs of memory and storage components that have been in tight supply due to artificial-intelligence demand. Though Cook said Apple has tried to avoid passing on price increases to customers, "the situation has become unsustainable," he told The Journal.

Memory and storage makers, on the other hand, have greatly benefited from the shortages, which Deutsche Bank analyst Melissa Weathers said will likely continue in the near term.

Despite corporate plans to expand the capacity of dynamic random-access memory and NAND memory, Weathers said in a Monday note that "DRAM bit demand is still set to vastly outpace supply growth in the coming years" as agentic AI and the shift to inference require more memory. Bit refers to the smallest unit of data stored.

She said the supply-demand imbalance would continue into the second half of this year through 2028. That dynamic led her to raise her price target on Micron's stock to $1,500.

Micron reports earnings next Wednesday afternoon.

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-Britney Nguyen

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06-18-26 1756ET