Morgan Stanley Upgrades Micron to Overweight, Lifts Target to $220 After 123% Rally - Sees 17% Upside

Micron (NASDAQ: MU) has ripped higher in 2025 - roughly a 123% gain year-to-date - and Morgan Stanley thinks the rally still has room to run. The bank moved Micron from equal weight to overweight and lifted its price target from $160 to $220, a jump that implied about 17% upside at the time of the call.

Analyst Joseph Moore laid out the logic: valuation versus the last cycle peak still leaves headroom, and he's looking for multiple quarters of double-digit price improvements in memory chips to translate into bigger earnings revisions. In plain terms, stronger DRAM and NAND buying and thinner inventories heading into 2026 are the immediate drivers he's watching.

There's a wrinkle in the story around high-bandwidth memory used in AI training. Concerns had popped up that NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) moving to faster HBM4 standards could put Micron at a disadvantage. Moore's take: Micron may trail SK hynix (KRX: 000660) by a quarter or so on volume for HBM4, but if Micron keeps its share and ships HBM4E die built at TSMC (NYSE: TSM), that lag wouldn't be decisive.

He also argued Micron's tech stack looks solid and the risk of a new memory leader emerging is low - in other words, the market's growth and tightening supply should do the heavy lifting to push earnings estimates higher.

So: after a year in which the stock more than doubled, Morgan Stanley raised its stance and target. That's a notable vote of confidence given how far prices have already climbed. Will the market hand Micron another runway of gains, or has much of that upside already been priced in?