MILPITAS, California, May 6, 2026, 08:01 PDT
Sandisk’s stock-market value has pushed past $200 billion, turning a newly independent flash-memory maker into one of the sharpest artificial-intelligence trades in U.S. semiconductors.
The shares traded at $1,391.24 in Wednesday morning dealings after touching $1,507, giving the company a market value of about $218.5 billion. That has put fresh attention on a one-year $4,000 stock call and, more important, on whether Sandisk can make a historically cyclical memory business look more like contracted infrastructure.
The timing matters because AI demand has moved beyond chips that train large models. Companies also need fast storage for inference, the stage where AI models answer user queries, handle long documents and keep data close enough for quick retrieval. NAND, a type of flash memory used in solid-state drives, is now part of that build-out.
Sandisk said last week it had signed five long-term customer supply agreements, three of them worth a minimum $42 billion, and had added two more in the current quarter. Chief Executive David Goeckeler told Reuters the aim was to escape the industry’s “boom-bust cycle” and move toward “consistent, predictable economics.” Reuters
The numbers explain the move. Fiscal third-quarter revenue rose to $5.95 billion, up 97% from the prior quarter and 251% from a year earlier, while non-GAAP earnings came in at $23.41 a share. Datacenter revenue rose 233% sequentially, and the company forecast fourth-quarter revenue of $7.75 billion to $8.25 billion, with adjusted earnings of $30 to $33 a share.
On the earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Luis Visoso said the new agreements include fixed and variable pricing, financial guarantees of more than $11 billion and $400 million of prepayments already on the balance sheet. The company also began talking about remaining performance obligations, or contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, a metric more common in software than in memory chips.
Goeckeler said Sandisk’s data-center business is benefiting from demand for enterprise SSDs, or solid-state drives, used in high-performance AI systems. He said NAND has become a “critical component” of AI infrastructure, and the company expects revenue shipments of its QLC Stargate product, a higher-density flash drive line, in the fiscal fourth quarter. The Motley Fool
That has changed how investors are viewing the company since Western Digital spun it off in February 2025. Leverage Shares wrote on TradingView that Sandisk is shifting away from a retail-heavy model toward corporate and data-center customers, with datacenter sales gaining share as consumer revenue becomes less central to the story.
The move is also being measured against peers. Western Digital, Seagate and Micron have all been pulled into the same AI-storage trade, but Sandisk’s current market value is now above Western Digital’s roughly $158.9 billion and Seagate’s roughly $176.8 billion, while Micron remains far larger at about $743.3 billion.
The bull case is no longer quiet. Motley Fool contributor Harsh Chauhan argued Wednesday that Sandisk could reach nearly $4,000 in a year if fiscal 2027 earnings hit Wall Street expectations of $168 a share and the stock trades at 22 times earnings. The piece pointed to supply shortages, higher NAND prices and customer contracts as reasons the rally could continue.
There is a harder read too. Seeking Alpha author The Techie wrote that the quarter was driven by price and mix rather than volume, with bit shipments down high-teens sequentially and technical indicators stretched. That is the main risk: if NAND pricing cools faster than expected, or customers push back on contract economics in a weaker market, the same operating leverage that helped Sandisk can cut the other way.
For now, Sandisk has given investors a rare combination in memory chips: a beat, a large buyback, fast-growing AI storage demand and customer commitments measured in tens of billions of dollars. The next test is whether those contracts hold their value after the current shortage eases.
