Key Background
The AI buildout has rewired the memory chip industry, transforming what was once a famously cyclical business into one of the hottest markets. Memory chips feed data to the likes of Nvidia’s GPUs to train and run AI models like ChatGPT or Claude. Micron, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are the three main players that manufacture memory chips at scale, and the AI demand has been a windfall for shareholders across all three players. Samsung crossed the $1 trillion mark first this month, Micron followed Tuesday morning and SK Hynix later that evening—becoming the third Asian company to reach that valuation, after Samsung and TSMC.
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Who Else Is Making Money Off Of The Memory Chip Boom?
The rally has minted and supersized fortunes across the sector: Four members of the Lee family that controls Samsung are now the four richest people in South Korea, led by executive chairman Jay Y. Lee, whose net worth has more than doubled to nearly $35 billion in less than six months. His sisters Boo-jin and Seo-hyun and mother Hong Ra-hee round out the top four with fortunes of $12.9 billion, $12.2 billion and $12.1 billion, respectively. Meanwhile, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won, whose conglomerate controls SK Hynix, has also seen his fortune climb sharply: His fortune has soared to $5.6 billion, more than triple his $1.7 billion net worth in January.
Tangent
Mehrotra’s billionaire status closes a long arc that began in Kapur, India, where he was born in 1958. He immigrated to the U.S. at age 18 to study at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1988, he cofounded SanDisk with Eli Harari and Jack Yuan. The company pioneered flash memory storage, went public in 1995 and was sold to Western Digital in 2016 in a $16 billion deal that Mehrotra helped engineer as CEO. Mehrotra was then tapped as CEO of Micron the following year, taking over a company whose stock then traded around $30. He has reaped the benefit of large stock awards as part of his compensation package, as Micron stock has soared some 3,000% since he took over as chief executive. (Western Digital, meanwhile, spun SanDisk back out as a standalone public company in early 2025, and SanDisk shares have themselves rallied sharply this year on the same AI memory tailwinds lifting Micron. SanDisk stock is up 569% this year and up a staggering 4,064% in the last 12 months to a $1,590 share price at Wednesday close.)
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Crucial Quote
“Micron, boy Micron’s great, they’re investing hundreds of billions,” President Donald Trump said at a rally in New York on Friday. Shares surged more than 18% on Tuesday, the first trading day since the presidential shoutout. Mehrotra joined Trump on a state visit to China in mid-May, alongside other business leaders including Elon Musk, Jensen Huang and Tim Cook.
What To Watch For
The memory business has historically been highly cyclical, meaning high demand has often been followed by sharp reversals, resulting in too much unsold inventory and crashing prices. While some argue this time around may be different because AI is creating a more sustainable demand, others point to previous busts in the memory industry—such as the 1990s, when the massive adoption of personal computers and the internet pushed the industry to expand aggressively before slowing demand killed the overly ambitious expansion efforts.
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