Milpitas, California, April 27, 2026, 11:06 (PDT)
- Sandisk jumped 7.4% to $1,063.55 on Monday, trading close to 9.6 million shares.
- Melius Research kicked off its coverage with a Buy and a $1,350 target for two years out, joining a wave of bullish calls from Wall Street.
- Sandisk Corporation is set to post its fiscal third-quarter numbers on April 30. Options traders are positioning for significant volatility.
Sandisk Corp surged to an all-time high Monday, jumping 7.4% to $1,063.55. Analysts are upping their forecasts, convinced that the AI-driven appetite for data storage is set to propel the flash-memory giant further. The move pushed Sandisk’s market cap to roughly $165.9 billion ahead of this week’s earnings report.
Timing could be key here. Sandisk is set for its fiscal third-quarter earnings call this Thursday at 1:30 p.m. Pacific, a moment that’s likely to gauge if the current NAND flash-memory rally has legs left. NAND, a chip technology that retains data even after power is lost, underpins solid-state drives and similar devices.
Sandisk shares surged after the company in January projected third-quarter revenue between $4.40 billion and $4.80 billion, with non-GAAP diluted earnings coming in at $12 to $14 per share. In the same report, Sandisk posted a 31% sequential jump in second-quarter revenue to $3.03 billion. Data-center revenue climbed 64%, thanks in large part to strong demand from AI infrastructure builders and major tech customers.
Ben Reitzes at Melius kicked off coverage on Sandisk and Micron Technology with Buy calls, assigning a $1,350 price target for Sandisk over two years and $700 for Micron. In his note, Reitzes pointed to what he called an “AI memory cycle” that could run through the decade’s end, highlighting robust demand for high-bandwidth memory, DRAM, and NAND. Investing.com
Cantor Fitzgerald bumped its Sandisk price target to $1,400 from $1,000, sticking with its Overweight call as it pointed to strong demand spanning hyperscale cloud, consumer, and client devices. Morgan Stanley also upped its target, now at $1,100, according to Investing.com.
The move dragged other names along, too. Micron jumped 4.9% Monday, according to market data. Western Digital, which spun off Sandisk as a public company in February 2025, edged down 0.4%. The company is still seen as a bellwether for the storage cycle.
Sandisk has also gotten a boost from index-driven buying. Nasdaq announced earlier this month that Sandisk is set to be added to the Nasdaq-100 Index before trading begins on April 20, taking the spot from Atlassian. The index comprises 100 of the largest non-financial stocks listed on Nasdaq and serves as the basis for more than 200 investment products managing over $600 billion.
Even so, there’s no shortage of traders piling in—and the risk is anything but minor. Options were pricing in a 16.57% implied swing for Sandisk following its earnings, signaling expectations for big action in just one session. Among mega-caps tracked by Benzinga this week, that was the highest implied move.
The big worry: memory’s cycles haven’t gone away. Should supply start ramping up ahead of forecasts—or if AI-driven data-center budgets pull back—the current pricing strength could fade, leaving those upbeat earnings projections exposed. In its January update, Sandisk pointed straight to product mix, enterprise SSD rollouts, and a demand picture that can turn fast when memory markets heat up.
