SanDisk Corp. (SNDK) shares kept climbing Wednesday as investors piled into AI-linked memory stocks, betting that booming data-center demand and tighter supply conditions could drive stronger NAND pricing and long-term growth in the enterprise SSD market.
The stock got a big boost from Barclays analyst Tom O'Malley, who upgraded SanDisk to Overweight from Equalweight and more than doubled his price target to $2,300 from $1,200. His reasoning? SanDisk's contract structure is changing the economics of the memory industry.
O'Malley highlighted that SanDisk's long-term agreements give customers both supply visibility and pricing flexibility, with contracts stretching as far as 2031. The deals include quarterly volume commitments and combine fixed near-term pricing with variable long-term pricing. That means if memory prices keep rising, SanDisk gets to benefit.
Here's the really eye-popping number: SanDisk signed three contracts last quarter carrying roughly $42 billion in minimum contractual revenue, backed by more than $11 billion in financial guarantees across five agreements. That's not just a nice pipeline — it's a fundamental shift in how memory companies lock in revenue.
Traders are also riding the broader AI storage "supercycle" narrative, which frames rising memory prices as a longer-term structural shift rather than a temporary spike. SanDisk, as one of the world's largest NAND flash memory suppliers, is right in the middle of it. It manufactures its chips through a joint venture with Kioxia in Japan.
Investors increasingly see SanDisk as a direct way to play AI-driven storage demand because enterprise SSD shortages and data-center expansion quickly translate into stronger pricing power for memory suppliers. The company returned to the public market as an independent company in 2025 after spending nine years under Western Digital Corp. (WDC) following the 2016 acquisition. That spin-off gave traders a more focused "pure-play" memory-cycle investment.
