Micron's 345% revenue surge and P/E ratio of 19 offer a cheaper AI play than Nvidia at 31 times earnings, while SpaceX's $31 billion capex burn keeps it in prove-it mode.
Micron Technology reported fiscal third-quarter sales of nearly $41.5 billion, up 345% from a year earlier, as AI data center demand for high-bandwidth memory pushed adjusted earnings to $25.11 per share. The memory maker's CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told analysts the industry has been "structurally transformed by the proliferation of AI" and that "we are only in the early innings of the significant innovation and productivity that can be unleashed."
Micron's price-to-earnings ratio of 19 is cheaper than Nvidia's 31, a gap the company's management expects to narrow if memory shortages persist through 2028. The memory market is forecast to climb from $230 billion last year to more than $1 trillion by 2027, driven by AI data center buildout.
Nvidia still commands 86% of GPU data center market share, but some tech companies including Alphabet are designing their own CPUs for AI agent tasks. Nvidia has answered with its Vera CPU, which the company says delivers 50% better performance for AI agents than the x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all evaluating Vera now. Nvidia's CPU push means competing against Intel's 67% server CPU market share and AMD's 33%.
SpaceX spent nearly $21 billion on capital expenditures last year and another $10 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone. The company's neocloud business has $81 billion in computing contracts with Anthropic and Alphabet, and analysts view its vertically integrated model – from Terafab semiconductor manufacturing to the Grok AI model – as a "sovereign AI" advantage. That spending pace leaves investors betting on a payoff that has not yet materialized.
Micron shares trade at a discount to Nvidia, and the company's revenue growth rate outpaces both competitors this quarter. Mehrotra pointed to autonomous vehicles and humanoid robotics as future memory demand drivers. Morgan Stanley estimates 1 billion humanoid robots globally by 2050, a potential $5 trillion market.
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