Key Takeaways
- Elon Musk dismissed an estimate that humanoid robots will use about 0.04% of 2026’s DRAM output, saying robot memory needs will exceed everything else on Earth.
- Robots won’t move Micron’s results for years, but a big new buyer late in the decade could keep memory scarce just as the Street expects Micron’s margins to fade.
- Tesla cut the memory on its Optimus robot chips to get enough supply, while memory makers like Micron and SK hynix already can’t keep up with AI data centers.
- Micron trades at 5.3x forward earnings, less than half its three-year average, so the market is pricing today’s earnings as a peak.
Elon Musk thinks the biggest memory buyer on Earth will eventually be robots. That’s a big claim for Micron Technology (MU) and SK hynix (SKHY), which already can’t make memory fast enough for AI data centers.
On Oct. 11, Counterpoint Research projected that DRAM demand from humanoid robots will rise about 20x by 2030. An X user who posts as @zephyr_z9 then ran the numbers: Counterpoint’s 2030 figure works out to about 550,000 humanoids a year using 21.5 petabytes of DRAM, or “around 0.04% of 2026 DRAM production.”
Musk, whose Tesla (TSLA) is building the Optimus humanoid, had a two-word answer: “Silly analysis.”
“Robot RAM needs will exceed everything else on Earth, as you need the robots to be on physical substates in order to shape atoms,” he wrote on X on Oct. 26.
Both sides can be right at once. And for Micron, the timing is what matters.
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Small potatoes for years
The 0.04% math holds up. Even if robot production ran 20x higher, about 11 million a year, @zephyr_z9 figures robots would need 430 petabytes of DRAM. That’s still under 1% of what the industry will make this year.
Micron’s own CEO is pitching the robot future, too. Sanjay Mehrotra said on Micron’s fiscal fourth-quarter call on Sept. 30 that “humanoid robots will also require similar amounts of memory and storage as autonomous vehicles.” But that’s a story for the end of the decade.
The Street’s earnings path for Micron runs on data center demand, with normalized EPS expected to more than double to $176.58 in fiscal 2027 and reach $206.89 in fiscal 2028.
Musk’s post shouldn’t move those estimates: the robots he’s describing show up after fiscal 2028.
The prize is a longer shortage
What robots could change is how long memory stays scarce, and scarcity is what drives Micron’s margins. Gross margin went from 2.7% in fiscal 2023 to 80.7% in fiscal 2026.
As Intel chief technology officer Pushkar Ranade put it on the Dwarkesh Podcast: “I would argue that the supply crunch is larger for memory today than it is for compute.”
Customers are acting like it. Bank of America’s Vivek Arya came away from meetings with Micron executives on Oct. 26 saying memory supply deals now run three to five years, where they once ran a year or less.
The Street still expects the squeeze to fade. Consensus has Micron’s gross margin sliding from 87.0% in fiscal 2027 to 65.5% in fiscal 2030, as new fabs come online in 2027 and 2028. That’s right when Counterpoint sees robot demand taking off. A new kind of buyer showing up just as supply catches up could keep that margin from falling as far.
Tesla already shows how that buyer behaves when memory is short. On Oct. 1, Musk said Tesla had cut the memory on its AI5 chip in half and on AI6 by a third, calling it “the only way to get enough volume for Optimus production.” (He soon nudged AI5 back up to 96GB.)
When the most eager humanoid builder is already rationing memory, the memory makers set the price.
Upside the stock isn’t pricing in
None of this is in Micron’s valuation. It trades at 5.3x forward earnings, less than half its 12x average over the last three years.
That’s roughly the level of 2017 and 2018, when the last memory cycle peaked.
Musk’s timeline is aggressive, and robots won’t be a line item in Micron’s results for years. But at a multiple that already treats today’s earnings as a peak, a second big buyer for memory late in the decade is upside investors are getting for free.
Of course, Micron, its rivals and China’s CXMT are all adding capacity in 2027 and 2028, and memory has gone bust before. SK hynix’s third-quarter results on Oct. 28 and Micron’s own report in December are the next reads on whether pricing holds.
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