Micron Technology (MU) kicked off Friday with a newsworthy announcement: its Manassas, Virginia plant has started making 1-alpha DRAM — what the company calls the most advanced memory ever produced in the United States.
The stock was trading around $754.61, down roughly 1% in early Friday trading, after a 4.1% jump on Thursday.
The Virginia facility will produce DDR4 and LP4 memory for automotive, defense, aerospace, industrial, networking, and medical device markets. Micron says the 1-alpha node represents the world’s most advanced DDR4 technology and will quadruple DDR4 wafer output at the site.
CEO Sanjay Mehrotra hosted an event at the plant alongside U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, and Virginia senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine.
Micron put more than $2 billion into expanding and modernizing the Manassas site, which supports over 3,100 direct jobs. The project received federal, state, and local incentives.
Qualified 1-alpha production from Manassas is expected by the end of calendar year 2026.
It wasn’t a quiet week in the memory space. Earlier in the week, Seagate CEO comments sent a chill through memory and storage stocks. He told an investor conference Monday that scaling up factories to meet storage demand would “take too long,” pulling Micron down to lows below $660.
But one analyst pushed back. Brad Gastwirth of Circular Technologies wrote that the sell-off “appears disconnected from the underlying supply chain backdrop,” arguing the comments actually pointed to a tighter supply and better pricing environment ahead.
Micron recovered from those lows by week’s end.
On the analyst front, BofA Securities raised its price target on Micron to $950, citing strong AI-driven demand for memory. Mizuho had previously bumped its target to $800, pointing to solid pricing expectations for both NAND and DRAM.
Micron also recently began sampling 256GB DDR5 modules built for AI servers, using its 1-gamma technology. The company says these modules cut operating power by over 40% versus current configurations.
The Virginia announcement is one piece of a much larger puzzle. Micron has an approximately $200 billion U.S. investment plan that also includes facilities in Idaho and New York.
The company broke ground on its New York complex in January. Its first Idaho facility is expected to begin wafer output in mid-2027. A second Idaho site is in ground preparation. The combined projects are estimated to create around 90,000 jobs.
Micron has also committed over $325 million to workforce development and community programs across all three states.
Meanwhile, rival Samsung Electronics avoided a planned strike after reaching a bonus-pay deal with its union late Wednesday, just hours before action was set to begin. Union members are voting on the deal through May 27. Samsung stock fell 2.3% in local trading Friday.
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