Micron Technology, Inc. (MU) shares slipped 2% on Wednesday but remain up 276% year-to-date — a modest pullback by the standards of a stock that has nearly quadrupled this year — with the move coming one week before the memory chipmaker reports fiscal fourth-quarter earnings on September 30.

The pullback came despite continued support from Wall Street. Citi raised its price target on MU to $1,300 from $1,150 ahead of the report, UBS expects Micron to fill only about 60% of DRAM demand next year, and analysts are modeling fourth-quarter revenue of roughly $51 billion, up about 350% from a year ago. Restrictions on share buybacks tied to CHIPS Act funding are also set to lift in December. Because memory sits at the center of the AI hardware buildout, next week's report is being read as a gauge of how tight the component market stays into next year.

Citi Lifts Target Ahead of Earnings

Citi analyst Atif Malik is not worried about the dip. He raised his price target on MU to $1,300 from $1,150 and kept a Buy rating, pointing to stronger-than-expected DRAM pricing on the roughly 60% of Micron's output that is not locked into long-term agreements. That uncontracted slice is where spot-market strength flows into results first, which is why the contracted-versus-spot split has become a focal point for analysts covering the stock.

Malik ranks No. 3 out of more than 12,500 analysts tracked on TipRanks. His calls carry a 79% success rate and have averaged a 48% return.

What Wall Street Expects From the Quarter

Analysts see fiscal Q4 2026 earnings per share landing around $31.49, a massive jump from $3.03 in the same quarter last year. Revenue is projected to surge about 350% to roughly $51 billion, with the growth driven by AI-fueled memory demand colliding with tight supply.

Malik expects Micron to guide fiscal first-quarter 2027 revenue to about $57 billion, with EPS near $35.25. He also expects shares to keep climbing into the SEMICON West event, where equipment makers are likely to flag shortages of DRAM, MLCC, PCB boards and optical components. Those bottlenecks could cap DRAM and NAND bit-supply growth in the low 20% range, which would keep prices elevated into next year.

Malik does expect price growth to cool over the next four quarters, however, with memory prices projected to peak in the second quarter of 2027.

The Supply Crunch, by the Numbers

UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri shares the bullish view, though he is watching a different angle. He expects the gap between memory-chip supply and demand to keep widening into next year and thinks Micron will only be able to fulfill about 60% of DRAM demand in that stretch.

Bit demand for server DDR memory could grow roughly 80% over the same period, and Arcuri sees bit demand for server and storage SSDs more than doubling in 2027. Bit demand — volume measured in raw memory capacity rather than dollars — is the number that determines how much new manufacturing capacity the industry needs to build.

He is telling clients to stop focusing on revenue upside and start watching capital return instead, since Micron's long-term supply deals are already capping how much analysts can raise estimates.

Buyback Restrictions Set to Lift

Micron's share buybacks have been restricted since the company took funding under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, a condition attached to direct funding under the program, but those limits lift in December. Arcuri expects quarterly repurchases to kick off around $20 billion in the February quarter before eventually ramping toward $40 billion to $50 billion a quarter — the capital-return channel he has told clients to watch as the better gauge of the story. He does not expect Micron to say much about buybacks on next week's earnings call, though, figuring the company will not want to get ahead of itself.

Wolfe Research analyst Chris Caso is on the same page as his peers. He said Micron's long-term agreements have given investors more confidence in how long the current upcycle can run.

Wall Street currently holds a Strong Buy consensus on Micron, with 30 Buy ratings and one Hold. The average price target of $1,563.04 implies about 46% upside from current levels.

Investors will get a clearer picture of where things stand when Micron reports fiscal Q4 results after the bell on September 30. Analysts say they will be watching DRAM and NAND supply guidance for 2027 and 2028, gross margin trends, and progress on HBM4 production — the high-bandwidth memory class that pairs with AI accelerators in data centers.

This article originally appeared on CoinCentral.