Zacks Investment Research assigned Micron its top Rank #1 (Strong Buy) rating this morning, citing the company's "significant role in the AI boom" and noting that Micron's 2026 HBM capacity is already sold out, driven by demand from AI chip partners including NVIDIA, Advanced Micro Devices, and Intel.
CEO Hock Tan disclosed $73 billion in AI-related backlog, including custom XPU accelerators, switches, and optical components. "We have never seen bookings of the nature that what we have seen over the past three months," Tan said on the Q4 2025 earnings call. The backlog includes orders from five hyperscale customers building custom AI chips, plus demand for Broadcom's 102 terabit per second Tomahawk 6 switch.
Shares of Micron ( NASDAQ: MU) are up about 14%, or by $31 this morning. All thanks to strong earnings. EPS of $4.78 beat by 82 cents. Revenue of $13.64 billion beat by $760 million. Moving forward, the company expects to earn between $8.22 and $8.62 per share, with revenue expected to be between $18.3 billion and $19.1 billion for the second quarter. Analysts were looking for $4.78 per share on revenue of $14.3 billion.
Compass Minerals reported a loss of $0.17 per share for Q4, beating the consensus estimate of a $0.23 loss by 25.7%. Revenue came in at $227.5 million, topping the $225.7 million estimate by 0.78%. More importantly, the quarter showed meaningful improvement versus the prior year. Net losses narrowed to $17.0 million from $48.3 million in Q4 FY2024, a 64.8% improvement. Revenue climbed 8.9% year over year from $208.8 million.
"If ChatGPT is somehow less reliant on Reddit, this refutes the idea that data licensing agreements will be re-upped for a higher rate," Champion wrote. "We understand why the stock is off. That said, we don't think anything has changed: Reddit content remains a potent asset for LLMs. Perhaps more importantly, the relationship (and traffic funnel) with Google seems intact. We expect a solid quarter and remain buyers of the stock."
