Micron’s Monster Quarter Sends Stock Ripping, Olive Garden Spoils Darden Earnings

**Zaid Admani** (0:00)
Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Thursday, June 25th. In today's episode, we'll break down Micron's monster earnings and why it saved the AI rally. We'll also tell you about the big moves coming from Qualcomm. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out who the second highest paid CEO was in 2025 And I guarantee you've probably never heard of this guy. We got a great show for you today.
Let's go.
Markets are coming off another down day of trading. The S&P 500 fell 0.1% yesterday, while the NASDAQ fell 0.4%. So not too bad, I guess, compared to what we were dealing with earlier in the week, but tech stocks continued to be under pressure on Wednesday. Things are starting to turn around today though. Tech and AI stocks are rebounding after a monster earnings report from Micron last night. We'll talk more about that in a bit. Outside of stocks, though, the major story continues to be oil as prices keep falling. Brent Crew dropped more than 4% yesterday to around $74 a barrel, and the US. Crew WTI fell to around $70 a barrel. Oil is now back to where it was before the Iran War started, and it could continue to move lower as more ships make their way through the Strait of Hormuz. So that should give investors and consumers some relief. The surge in oil prices from the war was a major contributor to rising inflation over the last few months. In fact, we got some more inflation data this morning. The May CPI report came out, which is the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, and it showed that inflation in May rose 4.1% compared to a year ago. That's the highest year over year increase for PCE inflation since April of 2023 And if you look at core PCE, which strips out food and energy, that rose 3.4%, the highest level since October of 2023 So inflation is running hot, but lower oil prices should help cool things off going forward. The big question though, is what is the Federal Reserve going to do next? Kevin Warsh was very clear in his press conference last week that he is focused on getting inflation down to the Fed's 2% target. And that's why the market right now is pricing in a 30% chance of a rate hike for the Fed's next meeting on July 29th. So we'll have to see what happens. Maybe the Fed waits a little bit longer now that oil prices are starting to come down. We'll stay on top of this development along with everything else happening in the market. So make sure you guys are to subscribe to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop.
Let's run through some headlines. And we're talking all things Micron. Micron reported earnings last night, and they might have single handedly saved the AI trade. The memory chip maker absolutely crushed expectations across the board. And some of these numbers are just insane. The company's revenues hit $41.5 billion last quarter, which is four times what it was in the same quarter last year, and way above the $35.7 billion that Wall Street was expecting. On top of that, the company's profits came in at $28.2 billion, or about $24.46 per share. That also beat expectations, and it's a massive increase from the same quarter last year, where the company made about $1.9 billion in profit. So the company's profits literally went up by 15x in the past year. I mean, I've never seen anything like this before. And the company sees no signs of things slowing down. They expect revenues to come in at $50 billion this quarter. Wall Street was expecting something closer to $43 billion, so they beat on guidance as well. And it's all thanks to AI and the memory supply crunch. Micron makes memory chips that are needed for literally everything in modern computing, from your iPhone to laptops to gaming consoles, and of course, AI data centers. That's the main driver of demand right now, is the high bandwidth memory or HBM. HBM is the super fast memory that sits next to AI chips, and it helps these AI chips process huge amounts of data. And because of the AI build out right now and the insane demand for HBMs, there's a supply crunch, which means that Micron literally can't make enough memory to meet demand, and that's allowed Micron to raise prices substantially and boost their profit margins. This is the stat from the earnings that made my jaw drop, Micron's gross margins hit 84.9%.
So that means after removing the cost of actually making the chip, Micron kept nearly 85 cents of every dollar in sales as gross profit. Now, to be clear, that's not the same thing as net profit. Micron still has to pay for R&D and overhead and taxes and all that fun corporate stuff, but still 85% gross margins for a memory chip company is absolutely wild. Just a year ago, Micron's gross margins was 39%.