Can anything stop Micron (MU +10.95%) stock's relentless rise?
Shares of the popular computer memory-maker are up in each of the past three trading sessions, including a quick 10.4% climb through 10 a.m. ET Tuesday. Partly this is in response to terrific earnings news from rival Sandisk (SNDK +11.96%) -- but today's news is all about Micron.
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Micron's (literally) big news
Micron this morning announced it has begun shipping a 245-terabyte solid-state drive called the Micron 6600 ION SSD. Describing the new SSD as "industry-leading" and "the world's highest capacity commercially available SSD," the company also boasts that its new drive offers "breakthrough energy efficiency versus hard drives."
For Micron's artificial intelligence customers who are so starved for energy that they've begun building their own nuclear power plants, you have to assume that'll be an attraction. And in fact, Micron's aiming the new product directly at the AI industry. Announcing the 6600 ION, Micron says it's specifically designed for use in data centers and "designed to support AI, cloud, enterprise and hyperscale workloads."
And one storage rack equipped with 6600 IONs, the company argues, can do the work of approximately five racks equipped with hard disk drives.
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Key Data Points
What's it mean for Micron stock?
Micron backs up its boasts with a slew of statistics: "84 times better energy efficiency" than HDD-centric systems, "8.6 times faster AI preprocessing," and "29 times lower latency." Those all sound like arguments for using Micron SSDs instead of hard disks from Western Digital (WDC +5.18%) or Seagate (STX +4.40%), but Micron also says it offers NAND memory that's a full generation ahead of anything its competitors (like Sandisk?) offer, too.
When you consider that Micron stock costs 27 times earnings, versus 43x earnings for Sandisk, the choice for investors seems clear.
