Micron's latest quarterly profit jumped 1,078% year on year on a 70% net margin, with roughly $1.57 million of net profit per employee over the past year, driven by AI data-centre demand for memory chips.
Micron is an American semiconductor company that makes things you have probably never heard of: DRAM, flash memory, solid-state drives. They sit inside phones, servers and cars. Founded in 1978, it is headquartered in Boise, Idaho — not Silicon Valley.
An absurd set of numbers
On 30 September 2026 Micron reported its quarterly results. Revenue of $54.2 billion, up 346% year on year. Net profit of $37.7 billion, up 1,078%. Net margin of 70%.
Think about what that means: for every $100 of product sold, $70 is pure profit. The company expects about $61.5 billion of revenue next quarter, still growing at 352%.
Few people, a lot of money
Micron employs only about 54,000 people. Over the past year it earned roughly $85 billion in net profit — about $1.57 million per employee.
Per head, it out-earns the vast majority of software companies. It is now worth about $1.2 trillion, the tenth most valuable company in the US.
The immediate cause of this surge is not phones but AI data centres: training and running large models requires enormous quantities of memory, and Micron is one of the top suppliers.
One industry's staple being repriced by another industry's appetite is roughly what this looks like.
Why it matters
Memory chips have long been treated as a commodity, priced by the market, with no moat anyone would defend. This quarter's profit came not from a technical breakthrough but from AI data centres pulling demand to another order of magnitude — which is to say a cyclical industry's income statement can start looking like a software company's within a quarter or two.
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