Micron Technology's new quarterly financial report released a "surprise gift package". Asia-Pacific chip stocks such as Hynix and Samsung soared on hearing the news. As Nvidia launched the most powerful AI chip in history, the market's enthusiasm for artificial intelligence is still heating up rapidly.

In Asia-Pacific stock markets on Thursday, Samsung rose 3%, close to a three-month high, and SK Hynix rose more than 8%, hitting a one-week high.

Driven by the strong performance of chip stocks, South Korea's benchmark KOSPI index closed up 2.41% at 2,754.86 points, hitting its highest level in the past two years.

Earlier, Micron Technology stated in its second fiscal quarter (three months as of February 29) conference call that the company's new HBM3E chip (the fifth-generation HBM, the market's highest-specification DRAM product for AI applications) this year All production capacity has been sold out, and most of next year's production capacity has been booked.

Micron Technology predicts that throughout fiscal year 2024, the HBM series of products will bring "hundreds of millions of dollars" in revenue to the company, and is even expected to rival the company's second largest business, the NAND business.

Micron Technology also revealed that HBM3E will supply Nvidia’s AI chip H200 GPU. The company started mass production of HBM3E at the beginning of the year and began to deliver it one after another.

The news came as a surprise to Wall Street.

Some analysts interpreted this as "a strong signal of booming demand for Nvidia's Blackwell chips." Previous reports stated that HBM3E will power Blackwell, Nvidia’s most powerful AI chip in history.

Not only that, Micron Technology’s second-quarter results “crushed” Wall Street expectations in all aspects:

Revenue surged 57.7% year-on-year to US$5.82 billion, which was not only much higher than analysts’ expectations of US$5.35 billion, but also exceeded previous performance guidance;

Adjusted earnings per share were $0.42, while analysts expected a loss of $0.24 per share, making the company profitable one quarter earlier than originally expected.

Boosted by the financial report, Micron Technology's stock price surged more than 18% in after-hours trading on U.S. stocks on Wednesday.

At the same time, Samsung and SK Hynix also received good news.

Previously, NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Huang Renxun said at the GTC 2024 conference that NVIDIA is testing Samsung's HBM chips and may adopt them in the future.

As Nvidia's current only HBM3 chip supplier, SK Hynix announced on March 19 that it has begun mass production of HBM3E and will supply customers from later this month. On the same day, Nvidia launched the Blackwell series of chips at the GTC conference.

Analysts believe that driven by downstream demand, the memory chip industry will be in short supply in 2024. Samsung's chip business may return to profitability, and SK Hynix's first-quarter operating profit may further increase.