Bank of America downplays China’s threat to Micron’s AI business

Bank of America’s semiconductor analyst Vivek Arya reiterated a Buy rating on Micron Technology on July 21, maintaining a $1,550 price target that implies roughly 66% upside from current levels. The core thesis: China’s AI ambitions aren’t a threat to Micron’s memory business. They’re a tailwind. Why Chinese AI models need more memory, not less The specific concern centered on models like Moonshot’s Kimi K3, a Chinese open-source AI system that has impressed the industry with its capabilities. The worry was straightforward: if China can build competitive AI models more cheaply, maybe the world doesn’t need as much expensive high-bandwidth memory. Arya’s rebuttal is built on actual hardware specs. The Kimi K3 model requires approximately 1.4 TB of high-bandwidth memory per serving instance. That’s a staggering amount of HBM for a single deployment, and it suggests that as these models proliferate across data centers, demand for advanced memory products doesn’t shrink. It multiplies. The cheap API pricing that Chinese AI companies have been offering comes from operational efficiencies, not from using less silicon. This distinction matters enormously for Micron’s business model. The c...