Shorting Micron (MU.O) is likely to be costly. Data-center memory demand is
forecast to rise from $60 bln in 2024 to $1.4 tln by 2030 — roughly 23x growth
and excluding mobile, notebook and automotive demand. Only three suppliers
manufacture this memory: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Market focus is on HBM
(high-bandwidth memory) rather than commodity DRAM; HBM is physically mounted
adjacent to NVIDIA GPUs — a Blackwell GB200 requires 192GB HBM and an NVL72 rack
13,824GB. Meta and Microsoft are ordering racks in the thousands, creating
large, certain HBM procurement. Micron has sold out its HBM allocation for 2026
before the year began, signed 16 take-or-pay contracts locking at least $100 bln
of revenue, and received $22 bln in prepayments for chips not yet produced. With
roughly one-third of the global memory market, Micron would capture about $470
bln of the $1.4 tln data-center market alone. Shorting Micron effectively bets
hyperscalers stop building and AI demand vanishes.
