Markets do not price companies. They price inferences about companies. The distinction matters, because an inference can be directionally correct and numerically reckless at the same time. Micron Technology’s crossing of one trillion dollars in market capitalization this week is a case study in exactly that failure mode: a conclusion that follows from the evidence, pushed well past what the evidence actually supports.

Start with what the data says, stated without editorial softening. Micron’s second fiscal quarter 2026 delivered $23.9 billion in revenue, up 196% year-on-year. Non-GAAP gross margin reached roughly 69%, a level the company had never approached in a prior cycle. High-bandwidth memory — the stacked die architecture that feeds the bandwidth requirements of large-scale AI accelerators — is entirely sold out through calendar 2026 under binding, price-fixed contracts with hyperscalers. Micron has begun volume shipments of HBM4 aligned with Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform. Management forecasts the HBM total addressable market expanding from approximately $35 billion in 2025 to $100 billion by 2028, a timeline pulled forward by two years from prior estimates. None of that is conjecture. It is contracted, reported, and confirmed by the buyers on the other side of those agreements.

SiFive has raised $400 million to accelerate RISC-V-based data center solutions. The headline reads as another semiconductor funding round. The subtext is a bet on architectural decoupling at the infrastructure level.

RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture. Unlike x86 (Intel/AMD) or ARM (licensed through Arm Holdings), RISC-V carries no royalty obligation and no single corporate owner. Any organization can implement it, modify it, and deploy it without licensing exposure. For years this was an academic curiosity. It is no longer.