Micron Posts Record $23.9B Quarter as HBM4 Demand Drives $25B Equipment Spending Spree

By NineScrolls Team · 2026-03-27 · 4 min read · Industry

Q2 2026: 196% Revenue Surge Obliterates Estimates

Micron Technology reported fiscal Q2 2026 results on March 26 that shattered Wall Street expectations. Revenue hit $23.86 billion, up 196% year-over-year from $8.05 billion in Q2 FY2025 and 75% higher sequentially. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $12.20, crushing the consensus estimate of $8.79 by nearly 39%.

Gross margin expanded to 75%, up from roughly 52% a year ago — a gain of 2,300 basis points. Operating cash flow reached $11.9 billion, more than tripling the $3.94 billion generated in the same quarter last year. The data center segment led the charge at $13.5 billion (57% of total revenue), followed by mobile and client at a record $7.7 billion.

HBM4 Volume Shipments Begin for Nvidia Vera Rubin

The headline driver is High Bandwidth Memory. Micron has commenced volume shipments of its 12-Hi HBM4 stacks, optimized specifically for Nvidia's next-generation "Vera Rubin" GPU architecture. The new HBM4 offers a 2.3x bandwidth increase over the previous generation while consuming 20% less power.

The total addressable HBM market is estimated at roughly $62 billion for 2026. Micron holds approximately 24% of that market, up from 20% in 2025, while SK Hynix retains about 60%. Critically, Micron's entire 2026 HBM supply is 100% sold out under binding contracts, with pre-sold visibility extending through the end of 2027.

$25 Billion Capex Plan Sends Equipment Orders Surging

To meet this demand, Micron raised its fiscal 2026 capital expenditure guidance from $20 billion to over $25 billion. Q2 net capex alone was $5.0 billion. The company is channeling the spending into state-of-the-art lithography and deposition tools for its 1-gamma node DRAM production lines, along with new fabrication facilities in Idaho (ID1) and Tongluo, Taiwan, which will begin incurring $100–200 million in quarterly startup costs beginning in Q3.

Equipment suppliers ASML and Applied Materials are seeing a surge in orders tied directly to Micron's capital allocation. This comes on top of TSMC's own record $52–56 billion capex plan for 2026, creating an unprecedented wave of tool demand across the semiconductor equipment supply chain.

What This Means for Plasma Processing and Thin Film Deposition

HBM4 manufacturing is among the most deposition-intensive processes in the semiconductor industry. Each 12-Hi stack requires hundreds of thin film deposition steps — atomic layer deposition (ALD) for ultra-precise dielectric and barrier layers, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) for inter-die insulation films, and physical vapor deposition (PVD/sputtering) for copper and tungsten interconnects between stacked DRAM dies.

The 1-gamma DRAM node pushes plasma processing demands further. Gate-all-around transistor structures at this node require plasma-enhanced CVD (PECVD) for conformal spacer and liner films, along with highly selective plasma etch processes to define nanoscale features without damaging adjacent layers. Each generation increase in HBM stack height multiplies the number of deposition and etch cycles per wafer.

For the equipment supply chain, Micron's $25B+ capex translates directly into orders for plasma sources, sputtering targets, vacuum pumps, mass flow controllers, gas delivery systems, and process monitoring instruments. Applied Materials (Endura PVD, Producer CVD), Lam Research (ALTUS ALD, Kiyo etch), and Tokyo Electron (TELINDY thermal processing) are the primary beneficiaries. The combined capex of Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix for memory alone is projected to exceed $55 billion in 2026 — all flowing through the same equipment OEMs and their component suppliers.

Outlook: $33.5B Q3 Guidance Signals No Slowdown

Micron guided Q3 FY2026 revenue to $33.5 billion (±$750 million), with non-GAAP EPS of $19.15 and gross margin expanding to approximately 81%. If achieved, that single quarter would exceed Micron's entire fiscal year 2024 revenue. The company also announced a 30% dividend increase, signaling management's confidence in sustained cash generation.

The memory supercycle shows no signs of peaking. With AI training clusters and inference farms consuming HBM at rates that continue to outstrip supply, every major memory fab on the planet is running at full utilization — and ordering more deposition, etch, and packaging equipment as fast as suppliers can deliver it.