By Stephen Nellis and Juby Babu
Dec 17 (Reuters) - Micron Technology forecast second-quarter adjusted profit at nearly double what Wall Street analysts expected on Wednesday, buoyed by soaring prices for memory chips spurred by tight supplies and booming demand from artificial intelligence data centers.
Shares of the Boise, Idaho-based company rose 14% in extended trading after the forecast.
Micron said it expected adjusted profit of $8.42 per share, plus or minus 20 cents, versus analyst estimates
of $4.78 per share, according to LSEG data.
Micron's chips are fundamental components in everything from data center servers and personal computers to smartphones and vehicles. But it is also one of only three major suppliers, along with South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, of what are known as high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, essential for training and deploying generative AI models.
The company is seeing strong demand from data centers, fueled by increased spending by large-scale cloud service providers that offer hardware and cloud capacity as services.
The company projected revenue for the current quarter at $18.70 billion, plus or minus $400 million, compared with analysts' average estimate of $14.20 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.
For the just-ended fiscal first quarter, Micron said it had sales and adjusted profit of $13.64 billion and $4.78 per share, compared with analyst estimates of $12.85 billion and $3.95 per share, according to LSEG data.
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Matthew Lewis)
