When you hear the name of memory card, the name of the company that first comes to your mind, that is the company i.e.
#SanDisk is the picture of the stock market for the last one year.
When SanDisk spun off from Western Digital in February 2025, not many people thought that this stock would return more than 1500% in one year! A recent article highlighted two main reasons why this growth may continue in 2026!
The first and biggest reason is the boom in artificial intelligence or AI. We're just talking about
#NVIDIA or
#GPUs but forgetting about the amount of data storage required to train these massive AI models. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, recently said that the AI storage market is currently almost completely unserved and is going to be the largest market for data storage in the future. For AI or data centers, ordinary hard drives or slow storage are no longer needed, high performance SSDs and NAND Flash memory are needed. This is exactly where SanDisk has become a game changer. Their high end storage solutions are now selling like hotcakes, as they are essential in building AI infrastructure.
The second reason is the supply and demand game. There is a huge shortage of high quality flash memory in the market now. According to TrendForce data, the price of NAND flash could increase by about 33% to 38% in the first quarter of 2026. As demand outstrips supply, SanDisk is able to raise the price of their products, which directly increases their profit margins. The evidence of this is also found in the latest earnings report. Their gross margin jumped to 51.1%, skyrocketing compared to the previous year.
Bullish Wall Street analysts (such as Barclays or Bernstein) are raising their price targets on the stock from $750 to $1,000, making it clear that the market is now pricing SanDisk as a growth stock. This is a classic example of how AI driven demand in the semiconductor industry can change the valuation of legacy companies.
𝑫𝒊𝒔𝒄𝒍𝒂𝒊𝒎𝒆𝒓: This Analysis. ⚡