CNBC Daily Open: Nvidia may still be tech’s king, but Micron just stole a scene - CNBC

In a significant development for the semiconductor industry, Micron Technology has overtaken NVIDIA and Meta to become Wall Street's new 'margin king,' driven by strong profitability amid continued de... Read original →

Micron’s ascent as Wall Street’s margin leader signals a pivotal shift in AI infrastructure: from pure compute dominance to memory-compute co-optimization. Surging HBM demand is accelerating EUV adoption below 3nm and forcing TSMC and Samsung to expand CoWoS/TSV packaging capacity, triggering a supply-chain tech cascade. On compliance, U.S. scrutiny of AI 'distillation' by Chinese firms like Alibaba will inflate their effective cost of accessing advanced memory, pushing them toward proprietary chiplet designs. Strategically, SK Hynix’s record-breaking Nasdaq listing aims to lock in HBM3E leadership, while Qualcomm’s data center push sets up a direct clash with NVIDIA’s Grace ecosystem. Over the next 12–24 months, memory chips—not just GPUs—will become the profit epicenter of AI hardware, redefining semiconductor capital allocation around ‘memory as strategic asset.’