Micron's Customers Paid $12.9 Billion Up Front to Hold Their Place in the Memory Line

A record quarter with a 14th week inside it

Micron closed fiscal 2026 with fourth-quarter revenue of $54.23 billion, up from $11.32 billion a year earlier, at an 86.8% gross margin and $37.70 billion of net income ¹. The Street wanted $51.07 billion and $31.61 in adjusted earnings; the print cleared targets already called "sky-high"↗ ⁴⁵.

One calendar note: the quarter just closed ran 14 weeks, and the next runs 13↗ ⁸. The December quarter is guided to $61.5 billion of revenue at roughly 86% gross margin↗ ¹. The guide still implies about $4.7 billion of revenue a week against the $3.9 billion Micron just booked ¹.

The line the wires skipped

Lower in the same 8-K↗ sits the number that matters more: noncurrent customer contract liabilities of $12,895 million at year end, against $568 million in May and $142 million a year earlier ¹. The cash flow statement records $12.75 billion of deposits taken during the year ¹. In the final quarter the balance grew by $12.3 billion while net capital spending ran $10.77 billion ¹: customers, in effect, funded that quarter's factory build.

Management's remarks fill in the shape: 26 multi-year take-or-pay agreements↗ covering more than 35% of revenue through 2030, $32 billion of customer commitments with the vast majority already in cash, and about $150 billion of performance obligations at committed volumes and minimum pricing ⁶. The filing never names who paid.

Who got paid, and who is paying

Micron ended the year with $73.48 billion of cash, investments and restricted cash, and long-term debt of $4.69 billion, down from $14.02 billion, after repaying $10 billion ¹. Two credit-rating upgrades landed in the quarter, and capital returns step up from December 9, the second anniversary of its CHIPS agreements ⁶. Bank of America's Vivek Arya has the stock as a top pick into that date↗, on an AI data center market now sized at $2.2 trillion through 2030 ³.

Downstream, the same shortage shows up as higher iPad and MacBook prices↗ ⁵, and Intel's chief executive says memory prices have risen five to seven times, with worse to come ⁸. The memory inside phones and PCs now carries a 90% gross margin at Micron ¹. The PC and phone buyers who did not prepay inherit whatever wafer allocation is left, the tail The Inference's 28 September read on the serving stack moving the cache off HBM flagged before the print.

One filing, two trades

The confirmation camp sees no sign of the cycle turning, and management expects revenue to grow sequentially every quarter of fiscal 2027 ⁵⁶. The other camp reads the deposits as peak-cycle capitalization: take-or-pay shifts timing risk onto the buyers who paid first, and price ceilings cap Micron's upside once contract-price gains decelerate from the low 60s toward the teens ⁸. The filing adjudicates: the deposits pre-fund the build and the December 9 capital-returns step-up, and the same line is the bill later buyers pay.

The next readings are dated. The December balance sheet shows whether $12.9 billion in deposits grows or shrinks, and whether $150 billion of obligations compounds ⁶. The memory famine now has a queue, and the queue has paid.