#Gate全球首发股票事件合约 Storage Becomes the “New King” of Semiconductors: Micron Up 217%, SanDisk Up 531%—Can This Rally Still Be Chased?

Recently, memory chips have once again become the market focus. On September 9, Susquehanna analyst Mehdi Hosseini made his assessment: memory has become the “king” of the semiconductor industry, and this position may persist.
AI data centers are reshuffling demand across the entire semiconductor industry, and memory happens to sit at the core of this expansion.
The broader market speaks first: the industry itself is sprinting
The latest data from the Semiconductor Industry Association: Global semiconductor sales reached $146.8 billion in July 2026, up 135.1% year over year and 6.4% month over month.
Cumulative sales for the first seven months of this year have already surpassed the previous record for an entire year globally. Capital is accelerating toward data centers and AI products, while memory is an indispensable part of AI servers and now accounts for 50%—55% of semiconductor revenue. It is not just HBM—mainstream DRAM is also being liftedMany people’s first reaction when discussing the memory rally is HBM. But as the number of AI servers rises, GPUs, CPUs, networking, and storage systems all need to expand, meaning DRAM and enterprise SSDs in servers are also benefiting. Demand has expanded from high-end AI memory alone to the entire data-center storage ecosystem.
SK Hynix has also confirmed this trend: As investment in AI infrastructure increases, demand for both AI memory and conventional memory is expanding simultaneously. The company has signed long-term agreements with around 10 customers to secure medium- and long-term supply. Prices are rising, but supply cannot catch up easily
The most critical variable in the memory industry is pricing. TrendForce expects traditional DRAM contract prices to rise 13%—18% quarter over quarter in the third quarter of 2026, while NAND Flash contract prices are expected to rise 10%—15%.
There is a transmission chain on the supply side: Manufacturers are shifting limited capacity toward HBM, server DRAM, and enterprise SSDs, squeezing the supply available to consumer electronics.
The stronger AI demand is, the tighter high-end memory becomes; the tighter high-end memory becomes, the more easily conventional memory supply is squeezed. Micron and SanDisk were singled out not because they rose the most, but because they are well positioned
As of September 9, Micron was up around 217% year to date, while SanDisk had risen nearly 531%—already an astonishing gain. But analysts are not focused on the magnitude of the increases: Micron covers DRAM, HBM, and NAND, while SanDisk focuses more on NAND and data storage. Their areas of benefit are not identical, but both have caught the cycle of rising prices and demand.
How long can price hikes hold?
The misconception lies in pricing several years of high growth into the stock price all at once. Memory is a cyclical industry. There is no question that AI is bringing structural incremental demand, but once manufacturers expand capacity and new capacity comes online, supply and demand will eventually rebalance. Tight supply in the short term is certain, but TrendForce has also warned that consumers’ ability to tolerate continued price increases is declining.
What deserves attention
Rather than watching stock prices, these three signals deserve greater attention: whether AI server capital expenditure can hold up, how capacity will be allocated between HBM and server DRAM, and when the newly expanded production lines can actually ramp up. Even SK Hynix itself is increasing its investment—it just spent around 54 trillion won to build a new site in August. The industry has already expressed its position with real money, betting that demand will continue to rise. $MU