Intel Continues to Get Pummeled: Why One Analyst Maintains His Conviction That 130% Gains Will Come

Alex Sirois

Wed, July 29, 2026 at 7:18 PM GMT+3 5 min read

Quick Read

ChangXin Memory's 466% Shanghai IPO triggered a memory sector rout, sending Micron down 27% in a month despite 345% revenue growth and margins near 85%.
Ben Reitzes kept his Street-high $2,200 MU target, arguing HBM3E and HBM4 contracts with NVIDIA and AMD structurally separate Micron from commodity DRAM cycles.
SNDK dropped 47% over the past month and carries 102% implied upside to consensus, while WDC fell 21% but offers a narrower 37% implied upside.
Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Micron Technology didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) currently trades at $820.53, well below the Wall Street average price target of $1,507.38. That gap implies roughly 84% upside if the consensus is right.

JasonDoiy / Getty Images

Micron is the only US-based memory manufacturer and an emerging leader in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI accelerators. Revenue jumped 345.7% year over year in the most recent quarter, and non-GAAP gross margin expanded to 84.6% from 37.7%. The disconnect between strong fundamentals and a weak chart is worth unpacking.

A Chinese IPO Blew Up the Memory Trade

ChangXin Memory Technologies' Shanghai debut triggered the selloff. The Chinese DRAM maker soared 466% and reached a $487 billion market cap, surpassing Intel. MU fell 8.85% in a single session, has dropped 15.48% on the week, and is down 27.53% over the last month.

The pain was sector-wide. SanDisk lost 9%, Western Digital fell 7% to 8%, and the Roundhill Memory ETF slid almost 12%. Morgan Stanley's Mike Wilson called the correction across semi and storage names "pretty well advanced" and severe. News-sentiment scoring on Micron landed at -0.410618, bearish.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Micron Technology didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

Why Melius Won't Move Off Its $2,200 Target

Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes kept his Street-high $2,200 price target on Micron, roughly 168% above current levels. His thesis rests on HBM. Reitzes models tight capacity for HBM3E and HBM4 combined with multi-billion-dollar non-cancelable contracts to supply AI accelerator architectures like NVIDIA and AMD, arguing this has structurally shifted Micron away from commodity DRAM cycles. He projects sustained gross margins scaling toward 80%-plus with premium pricing power sticky in future cash flow.

Bulls also note that CXMT is targeting DDR5 for Intel and AMD server sockets, where Micron holds a real lead. Multi-year Strategic Customer Agreements signed in Q3 FY2026 target cyclicality concerns. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said the agreements will "significantly enhance the durability and predictability" of the financial performance.

The rating sheet remains lopsided across 45 analysts:

Strong Buy: 9
Buy: 31
Hold: 4
Sell: 0
Strong Sell: 1

Recent revisions have skewed toward buy calls. Q4 FY2026 guidance of $50.0 billion in revenue and $31.00 in non-GAAP EPS gives the bull case a near-term catalyst.

Peers Fell Together, With Different Setups Underneath

The whole memory complex sold off in unison. What is inside the wreckage differs stock by stock.

Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) trades at $463.51, down 15.48% on the week and 20.96% over the past month. Its consensus target of $633.83 implies about 37% upside, with a rating mix of 4 Strong Buy, 18 Buy, 3 Hold, and 1 Strong Sell. Wall Street sees less headroom here than in Micron.

SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) took the worst beating, off 14.25% in a single session, 31.04% on the week, and 47.57% on the month. Its $2,217.77 consensus target implies roughly 102% upside from $1,096.10, with 3 Strong Buy, 15 Buy, 3 Hold, and 1 Sell rating on file.

SanDisk carries the headline upside across the group, though NAND was the epicenter of the CXMT rout. Micron's implied upside lands between the two peers, and it comes with the cleanest HBM franchise of the trio.

What the Numbers Actually Say

Micron currently trades at $820.53 against an average target of $1,507.38, implying roughly 84% upside across 45 covering analysts. The Melius Street-high at $2,200 pushes implied upside near 168%. Forward P/E sits near 6.

Year to date, MU is up 187.67% against 8.64% for the S&P 500. Over twelve months, the stock is up 638.75%. Polymarket currently assigns roughly a 52% combined probability to any close above $1,100 by end of July, so crowd sentiment stays cautious even with buyside targets far higher.

Where the Setup Lands on Micron

The bull case for Micron rests on the view that HBM is structurally different from commodity DRAM, and that multi-year customer agreements with NVIDIA-class buyers will hold through the next cycle. The bull path back to $1,500 requires continued gross margins near 86% in Q4 FY2026 as guided, another guide-up, and evidence that CXMT stays boxed out of the high-bandwidth tier.

The bear case rests on the view that China is quietly building a memory glut landing in 2027, or that 84.6% gross margins mark a cycle peak Wall Street is extrapolating too aggressively. Heavy near-dated put positioning at the July 31 put/call ratio of 1.16 shows options traders are hedging real short-term risk.

The research-oriented lean here is bullish. The HBM story looks real, pricing is doing what the bulls promised, and the analyst call sheet is one-sided for a reason. The path from $820 to $1,500 (let alone $2,200) will require nerves through more sessions like this one.