Micron Earnings Tonight: Wedbush Raises Target 56% to $500

Micron Technology will report its fiscal second-quarter earnings after Wednesday's closing bell, and the setup is cleaner than it has been in years — even as the broader market digests Fed day and an oil shock that is repricing inflation expectations across every asset class.

Wall Street consensus has coalesced around $8.74 to $8.77 in earnings per share on revenue of approximately $19.03 billion. That would represent a dramatic acceleration from the same quarter a year ago, when Micron was still working through inventory overhangs from the 2022 to 2023 memory downturn. The demand recovery, driven almost entirely by high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators, has been faster and steeper than most analysts modeled.

The specific numbers to watch in tonight's report are not the top-line revenue figure but the gross margin guidance and the HBM shipment commentary. Micron's gross margins have been expanding sharply as the product mix shifts toward premium HBM priced at multiples of commodity DRAM. If the company guides gross margins above 40% for the next quarter, it signals a structural profitability shift rather than a cyclical bounce.

Wedbush Securities raised its Micron price target to $500 from $320 — a 56% increase — arguing that the company's earnings outlook continues to improve with no visible ceiling on HBM demand. At $500, Wedbush is valuing Micron at a premium multiple justified by what amounts to an oligopolistic position in the memory technology that every major AI training and inference deployment requires.

RBC Capital has an outperform rating and a $525 target, with analysts pointing to the HBM order pipeline as the leading indicator for Micron's next four quarters. HBM sits inside every Nvidia H100, H200, and Blackwell chip. With Nvidia projecting $1 trillion in cumulative AI chip revenue through 2027, the downstream math for HBM demand is straightforward: every chip that ships requires HBM, and Micron alongside SK Hynix is one of only two companies capable of producing it at volume.

China remains a complicating factor. While Nvidia's H200 approval in Beijing today was broadly positive for the AI ecosystem, Micron has its own complicated China history: in 2023, Beijing banned Micron products from use in critical information infrastructure, cutting off a significant portion of its Chinese revenue. Whether today's Nvidia development signals a broader easing of U.S.-China tech tensions — or is a narrowly negotiated exception — will affect how investors model Micron's potential China re-entry.

Williams-Sonoma and General Mills both reported Wednesday morning. WSM beat on both top and bottom lines, with management citing resilient demand among its higher-income consumer segment. General Mills missed slightly on revenue, with its snack and cereal segments facing private-label competition and consumer trade-down behavior as gasoline prices climb. The Micron report tonight is the event institutional investors are positioning around most actively. Any HBM guidance commentary that exceeds the $19 billion revenue base case will likely push the stock meaningfully higher in after-hours, and that move will carry into semiconductor names Thursday morning.