Micron reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $54.23 billion, up 31 percent sequentially and 379 percent from the $11.32 billion of a year earlier, at a non-GAAP gross margin of 87.0 percent, and told investors it cannot see when memory supply and demand will return to balance.
Fiscal Q4 DRAM revenue was $39.8 billion, up 343 percent year over year and 27 percent sequentially, on bit shipments up a mid-single-digit percentage, with the DRAM price increase in the high-teens percentage range. NAND revenue was $14.1 billion, up 526 percent, with bits up about 10 percent and prices up about 30 percent. The growth is almost entirely price, which is what a shortage looks like on an income statement.
Core Data Center revenue was $18.0 billion at a 90 percent gross margin, from $1.58 billion a year earlier. Cloud Memory, which carries HBM, ran at 83 percent. HBM remains the lower-margin product, hence this line: "We have 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." Translated, next year's HBM was sold before this quarter closed, at shortage prices.
Contract structure is the story. Micron has signed 26 strategic customer agreements, multi-year take-or-pay deals estimated at more than 35 percent of revenue through 2030. Customer commitments under them have reached $32 billion, the vast majority as cash deposits, and remaining performance obligations stand at about $150 billion. CFO Mark Murphy qualified that figure: "RPO is based on committed volumes and minimum pricing and is inherently conservative." Note the deposits: Micron held $12.7 billion of customer cash at quarter end, books the receipts as financing activity, and so excludes them from the $33.2 billion of free cash flow it reported.
Guidance for fiscal Q1 is revenue of $61.5 billion plus or minus $1.5 billion, gross margin of about 86.25 percent and earnings of $38.15 a share plus or minus a dollar, non-GAAP. Murphy said, "We anticipate fiscal Q1 to be the floor for gross margins in fiscal 2027." The reason is cost: higher fiscal 2026 incentive compensation was absorbed into inventory and sells through in Q1. After that, "We expect higher gross margins beyond fiscal Q1 for the remainder of fiscal 2027, with a more moderate rate of price increases." Moderate means slower, not lower.
CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said of supply: "Even with additional industry DRAM cleanroom space plans, with robust demand trends including new upside requests from customers, we do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance." Micron expects industry DRAM bit shipments to grow in the low-20s percentage range in both calendar 2027 and 2028. Its answer is construction: capex of about $11.5 billion in Q1 and roughly $25 billion in the first half of fiscal 2027, weighted toward cleanroom space for late 2028 and beyond.
Spot prices tell a different story. TrendForce reports that mainstream DDR4 1Gx8 3200 chips averaged $46.32 on September 29, up 0.93 percent on the week, while 512Gb TLC NAND wafers slipped 2.45 percent to $19.396. Those are spot averages for commodity parts, not Micron contract prices; the shortage sits in contract supply to data center buyers, not the consumer spot channel.
The next demand leg Micron points to is physical AI: the remarks put memory content in Level 4 and higher autonomous vehicles above 200GB with multiple terabytes of storage, and say humanoid robots are expected to have comparable requirements. That is a forecast of content per unit, not of units, and Micron gave no unit numbers.
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