Micron's AI Boom Is a Utility Story Too. Here's the Power Angle Wall Street Isn't Pricing In.
Key Points
Micron is helping data centers do more with less electricity, while utilities stand to benefit from the power demand behind those racks.
If AI data centers become the factories of this decade, companies like NextEra, Constellation, and Entergy could see durable, long-term demand for their power infrastructure.
The next wave of winners could include the companies building the generation and transmission needed to keep America’s AI build-out running.
Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) has been on a tear recently, and its run in this artificial intelligence (AI) era is about more than just selling more memory. Micron's run is about solving one of the quiet bottlenecks in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, which is power, and that is where I think the story bleeds directly into utility stocks in a way the market has not fully priced in yet.
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Micron's latest numbers show just how central it has become to AI. In the third quarter of its fiscal 2026, total revenue hit $41.5 billion, up 346% year over year and marking the fifth straight quarterly record. DRAM revenue alone was $31.3 billion, up 343% and now 76% of total sales, while data center revenue topped $25 billion on an annualized run rate north of $100 billion. Analysts have pushed estimates higher, largely on the back of AI-driven demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and high-performance dynamic random-access memory (DRAM).
Underneath those numbers is a very specific technology angle. Micron's HBM3E memory, which sits right next to Nvidia's H200 GPUs and AMD's next-generation accelerators, delivers more than 1.2 terabytes per second of bandwidth while using about 30% less power than competing offerings. This means that AI clusters can either cut their electricity bills or pack more GPUs into the same power envelope, which is exactly what hyperscalers care about now that power availability has become a defining constraint for scaling AI.
Micron's U.S. investment push
Micron just raised its planned U.S. investment to more than $250 billion through 2035, aiming to put about 40% of its DRAM output on American soil to supply AI data centers and to support more than 90,000 jobs. Its solid-state drive (SSD) business is also framed in power terms now.
When Micron announced its largest data center SSD earlier this year, the company explicitly said the breakthrough capacity gives operators "a critical new lever to improve rack‑level total cost of ownership, especially as power availability becomes a defining constraint for AI infrastructure scale." In other words, memory and storage have become part of the power story -- not separate from it
How utility stocks are affected
Once you see that, it is hard not to look downstream at utilities. Deloitte estimates that U.S. AI data center power demand could grow more than 30 fold from about 4 gigawatts in 2024 to 123 gigawatts by 2035.
NextEra Energy (NYSE: NEE) calls this period "a golden age of power demand" and plans to build roughly 15 gigawatts of new capacity by 2035 on top of the 33 gigawatts it added over the past four years. Constellation Energy (NASDAQ: CEG), Entergy (NYSE: ETR), and NextEra are already being singled out as long-term beneficiaries of AI-driven load growth precisely because they own the generation, transmission, and regulated rates that will be used to feed all those Micron-powered racks.
Even more traditional names like Edison International (NYSE: EIX), parent of Southern California Edison, are starting to show up in AI power discussions. Edison offers a dividend of around 4.4% and has been highlighted as one of the higher-yielding utilities positioned to benefit from rising data center demand in its territory.
If AI data centers really become the new factories of this decade, the companies selling them electrons may end up with steadier, underappreciated growth than most investors expect from "boring" utilities.
So yes, Micron is a pure AI winner, but it is also a reminder that the AI boom is turning into a utility story. The chips that save power at the rack level and the utilities that build the lines and generation behind those racks are both part of the same equation. The market has rewarded Micron for that role. I do not think it has fully rewarded the utilities yet, and that gap is where some of the more interesting opportunities may sit for patient investors.
Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Constellation Energy, Entergy, Micron Technology, NextEra Energy, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.