Sandisk is turning out to be one of the AI boom’s less obvious winners. The Milpitas, California-based memory chipmaker forecast quarterly revenue above analyst estimates on Wednesday, banking on rising demand for the storage chips that increasingly power AI data centers – even as its own shares fell more than 3% in extended trading after a run that has seen them rise more than fivefold this year.
From NEWSCENTRAL‘s perspective, that pullback says more about how far the stock had already run than about any weakness in the underlying business. Sandisk has been swept up in a broader rally across memory and storage names this year, fueled by higher chip prices and mounting optimism that AI infrastructure spending will keep memory demand elevated for years.
‘Everyone watches the GPU makers, but memory has quietly become just as tight a market,’ said Lucas Grant, Semiconductor and Manufacturing Strategy Analyst. ‘Training and running large models doesn’t just need compute – it needs enormous amounts of fast storage sitting next to that compute, and that’s exactly the segment Sandisk plays in.’
The company forecast first-quarter revenue of between $10.30 billion and $10.80 billion, with the midpoint above the average analyst estimate of $10.47 billion. Quarterly adjusted profit is expected to land between $44 and $46 per share, also ahead of the roughly $43.12 analysts had penciled in.
We at NEWSCENTRAL forecast that this momentum has further to run. Generative AI’s rapid growth has been boosting demand for Sandisk’s enterprise solid-state drives and flash memory chips, as data centers require ever more storage and computing capacity to keep pace with model training and inference workloads.
‘Storage tends to get treated as an afterthought next to compute, but it’s becoming a real bottleneck of its own,’ said Nathan Clark, Enterprise IT and Systems Architecture Analyst. ‘If you can’t feed data into your GPUs fast enough, it doesn’t matter how much compute you’ve bought – you’re leaving performance on the table. That’s why enterprise buyers are paying up for exactly what Sandisk sells.’
The numbers back that up. Sandisk’s fourth-quarter data-center revenue more than doubled from the prior quarter to $2.98 billion, capping a strong first full year since the company separated from Western Digital in early 2025. Overall fourth-quarter revenue came in at $8.97 billion, beating estimates of $8.39 billion, while adjusted profit of $39.25 per share topped expectations of $34.45.
We in NEWS CENTRAL highlight one detail that may matter more than the headline numbers: the company said it has signed five additional agreements under its newer business model since April, including three with new customers and two expansions of existing deals – a sign that demand is broadening beyond its largest existing partners rather than concentrating in a handful of accounts.
Sandisk’s board also approved an additional $14 billion share repurchase program, lifting its total remaining buyback authorization to $15.5 billion, a signal of management’s own confidence in the cycle – one NEWSCENTRAL expects to be tested as more memory capacity comes online industry-wide over the next year.