From a dental office basement to a trillion dollars: Is Micron the next Nvidia?

The chip that could make or break Wall Street's confidence in artificial intelligence no longer lives inside a flashy graphics processor. Increasingly, it sits inside a memory module, and it is made by a company that started life in a Boise, Idaho, dental office basement in 1978. For most of its four-decade existence, Micron Technology was the kind of stock serious investors avoided. Memory chips, dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, and its derivatives were a commodity. The business ran in brutal cycles: a shortage would lift prices and profits, manufacturers would race to add capacity, supply would overshoot demand, prices would collapse, and the cycle would repeat. MU was a trade, not an investment. Wall Street treated it accordingly. That...