Micron Surges to New Highs on Blockbuster Earnings 6/25/26

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**Scott Wapner** (1:00)
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Carl, thank you very much. Welcome to the Halftime Report. Scott Wapner front and center this hour. Micron's moment. That stock is surging after earnings. We will discuss and debate what all of it means for AI trade, for the markets in general, because we do, as Carl said, have a very interesting session shaping up. Joining us for the hour, Josh Brown, Joe Terranova, Stephanie Link, Jim Lebenthal. So Micron's moment is a good one, obviously, for that stock. But it's really interesting, this price action and some of these other names today. I'm wondering, Josh, what you make. I mean, it's a continued rotation. There's no doubt about that. But if you thought that Micron was just gonna, you know, relaunch the entire AI space with their blowout quarter, not happening today.

**Josh Brown** (2:05)
Oh, I disagree.

**Scott Wapner** (2:07)
Well, look at the hyperscalers.

**Josh Brown** (2:09)
That's not the AI trade. We've been through, the AI trade is not the hyperscalers. The hyperscalers are the people that are facilitating it with their spending. The AI trade is working really well today. Eight of the top 10 S&P 500 stocks on the day today are all a huge part of the AI build out. They're just not hyperscalers. And this is what the market's been doing all year. It's not even new.
Look at our stocks today. Corning, Flex, Applied Materials, Teradyne, Caterpillar, Western Digital. These are the top 10 DRAM ETF is up 9% today. The XLI is up 2% today. And I promise you, the leaders in the industrials are all AI infrastructure stocks.
That's up 4% on the day.
You also have other areas that are up. You have XPI doing well. You have the home builders doing well. That's interesting.
The transports are up 2% today. But the AI CapEx theme has swallowed the market this year. Unfortunately, for the hyperscalers, they're in the position of being the spenders on AI equipment. And they're not getting the benefit from their shareholders any longer. As a matter of fact, the Mag 7 as a group are dragging down the returns of the S&P 500 year to date. So that is the first time I've been able to say that in a very long time. Those stocks are net detractors, especially Meta and Microsoft. Very big in the index and very negative on the year. So we've got the AI trend in full force. Micron made everyone feel even better than they did yesterday. We just don't have the participation of the companies who are footing the bill.

**Scott Wapner** (3:44)
Okay.
Obviously, that's a fair assessment. I think that there were some out there who were thinking that this was a critical moment for the AI trade at large, that if Micron, because the mega caps have traded squirrely lately, right? And you had a NASDAQ surge in the pre-market, surge. And that's all but gone for a variety of reasons. Sandisk is up, speaking of things that are winning. The power players, in part to Josh's point, Steph, right here alone is a great place to look of the stocks that are getting a big bump off of Micron.

**Stephanie Link** (4:25)
Yeah, and the industrial companies are definitely the winners, for sure. And I've talked about the food chain, or if you want to talk about Jensen Wong and Five Layer Cake, it's the same thing. It's the hyperscalers are spending 800 billion dollars this year. They're on CapEx, and they're going to spend 1.6 trillion next year. This is not going to end anytime soon. So you want to own the companies that are building out the data centers. And we know data centers takes three years to build, 40 billion for one gigawatt plant. So there's a lot that goes inside of data centers, and those are the winners too.