Micron Heads Into Sept. 30 Earnings Test After 279% Rally

Advanced Micro Devices crossed the $1 trillion market capitalization mark for the first time on Monday, with shares surging 9.9% amid a broader tech-stock rally. The milestone caps a September in which CEO Lisa Su sat at President Trump's table during the state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping, two seats from Trump and next to Elon Musk, and rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange with first lady Melania Trump. AMD stock is up 193% year to date, far outpacing Nvidia's 22% gain. The chipmaker beat Wall Street expectations across the board for the second quarter, posting record non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.66 against consensus estimates of $1.61, with total revenue up 50% year over year to a record $11.5 billion and data center revenue more than doubling to $6.7 billion. AMD projected second-half 2026 server CPU revenue to grow 80% year over year and 70% in 2027, and expects data center revenues to more than double in 2027 with AI GPUs growing well over 100%. The company also unveiled its next-generation Instinct MI450 Series GPUs and 6th Gen EPYC Venice CPUs for its Helios rack-scale AI systems, alongside deals for Microsoft to deploy Helios across Azure AI services beginning in the second half of 2026 and for Anthropic to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 GPUs beginning in the first half of 2027, a deal that could be worth tens of billions of dollars over time, with AMD committing to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic.

Costco is absorbing low single-digit inflation across its merchandising categories, with the sharpest pressure coming from memory costs on consumer electronics tied to the AI boom. On the company's earnings call late Thursday, CFO Gary Millerchip said the increase was concentrated in non-foods, driven largely by memory costs on consumer electronics and oil-related items. Those pressured consumer electronics margins dragged Costco's gross profit margin down to 11.01% in the fiscal fourth quarter from 11.12% a year earlier. The memory chip market has tightened as demand for high-bandwidth memory and advanced dynamic random-access memory used in AI servers outpaces supply, and suppliers including SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron have largely sold out their premium AI memory capacity through much of 2026 as customers such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta race to build AI infrastructure. Experts expect memory supply to remain constrained into 2027, a favorable backdrop for the industry's largest producers such as Micron and Sandisk. Costco still posted a solid quarter, with total sales up 11.1% from the prior year to $95.72 billion, total comparable store sales up 9.4% and online sales up 19.5%, and Jefferies analyst Corey Tarlowe said the company remains one of retail's highest quality long-term compounders.

Elon Musk said xAI's Colossus 2 cluster could more than double its current number of Nvidia chips by year-end, scaling AI computing capacity across his businesses. Colossus 2 currently runs 110,000 Nvidia GB200 chips and 440,000 GB300s, according to Musk, with another 220,000 GB300s expected to be fully operational next week and a further 220,000 in November. Musk added that another 220,000 GB300s could come online by late December if we get lucky, which would bring Colossus 2 to roughly 1.21 million Nvidia GB200 and GB300 chips if every planned tranche arrives on schedule, more than double the 550,000 chips Musk said are currently installed. The buildout is especially notable because xAI already operates Colossus 1 with 150,000 Nvidia H100s, 50,000 H200s and 30,000 GB200s, and the SpaceX unit previously said it plans to equip its Memphis facility with 1 million graphics processing units by 2026. The planned additions are concentrated in Nvidia's latest-generation GB300 accelerators, highlighting continued demand for its most advanced AI hardware.