New York, January 9, 2026, 16:19 (EST) — After-hours
Sandisk (SNDK.O) climbed 12.8% to $377.41 in after-hours trading on Friday after a report said the flash-memory maker could more than double prices for some high-capacity 3D NAND chips used in enterprise solid-state drives. Nomura Securities said “channel checks” showed enterprise-grade NAND pricing was seeing “especially aggressive increases,” with Sandisk’s enterprise NAND cited as rising more than 100% from the prior quarter. The stock traded between $330.96 and $383.76 during the session, with about 19.2 million shares changing hands. 1
The talk matters because 3D NAND is the stacked flash memory inside SSDs — solid-state drives used to store data in servers and high-end PCs — and pricing swings can hit earnings fast. Sandisk, spun out of Western Digital and now in the S&P 500, has become a proxy for investor bets that AI is turning storage into a tighter, higher-priced part of the data-center buildout. 2
Friday’s jump followed a sharp pullback a day earlier, when Sandisk fell 5.4% as traders cooled on AI-linked winners. “While AI is still hot, there are going to be winners and losers,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth. 3
Other storage and memory names moved with it in late trade: Western Digital (WDC.O) was up 6.8%, Seagate Technology (STX.O) gained 6.9% and Micron Technology (MU.O) added 5.5%, while Nvidia (NVDA.O) was little changed.
The broader market got a lift from softer U.S. labor data that eased pressure on the Federal Reserve. Nonfarm payrolls rose 50,000 in December and the unemployment rate slipped to 4.4%, data that supported expectations the Fed will pause on rates at its next meeting. 4
But the run has unnerved some investors, with big daily jumps blamed on momentum buying and short covering — when traders who bet against a stock rush to buy it back. A Financial Times column this week said SanDisk’s surge looked excessive and tied more to speculative churn and short squeezes than to fresh fundamentals. 5
Sandisk’s next hard catalyst is Jan. 29, when it reports fiscal second-quarter results and hosts a conference call at 1:30 p.m. Pacific (4:30 p.m. Eastern), the company said. Traders will be listening for commentary on enterprise pricing and whether any upside is spreading beyond the highest-end data-center drives. 6
Morningstar analyst William Kerwin said Nvidia’s CES keynote likely helped drive the earlier leg higher, because the chipmaker’s new memory storage platform would “add more SSD storage to AI infrastructure to improve model speed,” Barron’s reported. Kerwin also cautioned that pricing strength can fade as supply catches up. 7
Next up, traders head into Monday with U.S. inflation data on deck — the December consumer price index is due on Jan. 13 — and Sandisk’s earnings report is scheduled for Jan. 29 after the market closes. 8
