Strong demand for AI servers, with Micron‘s latest financial forecast exceeding expectations

Source: Xinzhixun

    On December 21st, US storage chip giant Micron released its first quarter (August November) financial report and second quarter (December 2023 February 2024) financial forecast for the 2024 fiscal year after market hours local time. Thanks to increased demand from data centers, Micron‘s performance and financial forecast exceeded Wall Street‘s expectations, offsetting the slow recovery of the PC and smartphone markets.

    Specifically, in the first quarter of fiscal year 2024, Micron‘s revenue increased from $4 billion in the same period last year to $4.73 billion; The adjusted loss per share of the main business is 0.95 US dollars. According to a FactSet survey, analysts had originally predicted that Micron‘s first quarter revenue would be $4.58 billion, with a loss of $1.01 per share in its main business.

    Looking ahead to the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, Micron predicts a revenue of $5.3 billion (plus or minus $200 million) and an adjusted loss per share of $0.28 (plus or minus $0.07) for its main business.

   According to a FactSet survey, analysts had originally predicted that Micron‘s revenue for the second quarter of the 2024 fiscal year would only reach $4.97 billion. In addition, according to the LSEG survey, analysts had originally predicted that Micron would incur a loss of up to $0.62 per share in the second quarter of fiscal year 2024. Obviously, the performance guidelines released by Micron have exceeded market expectations.

    Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra pointed out that strong execution and pricing strategies resulted in better than expected performance in the first quarter. He also stated that the demand for AI servers has always been strong, mainly because data center infrastructure operators have decided to shift the budget of traditional servers to AI servers with richer content.

    Mehrotra pointed out that Micron‘s HBM3e high bandwidth memory will be applied to Nvidia‘s next-generation Grace Hopper GH200 superchip and H200 GPU, and it is currently in the final quality control stage.

    Micron predicts that PC sales are expected to increase by 1-5% year-on-year in 2024, ending two consecutive years of decline; The demand for smartphones is also expected to show signs of recovery and will grow slightly in 2024.