New York, Jan 7, 2026, 16:44 (ET) — After-hours
- Sandisk shares rose 1.2% on Wednesday, outpacing a pullback in storage peers.
- The week’s surge followed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s CES comments highlighting a new layer of storage technology.
- Investors now turn to Jan. 29 results for updates on NAND pricing and AI-driven demand.
Sandisk Corp shares were last up 1.2% at $353.56 in after-hours trading on Wednesday. Western Digital and Seagate slid 8.9% and 6.7%, but Sandisk held near the highs after a 27%+ jump on Tuesday tied to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s CES remarks on a new layer of storage technology; it traded between $331.74 and $355.10 on Wednesday. Nvidia rose 1%, and “we’re going to have a very strong earnings season for Big Tech,” said Jed Ellerbroek at Argent Capital, pointing to higher capital spending. Reuters
The trade matters because investors are starting to treat storage as the next choke point in AI infrastructure, not a back-office commodity. Huang described the memory storage market as “completely unserved” and said it could end up holding the “working memory of the world’s AIs,” according to a Business Insider report. Business Insider
Sandisk, which sells NAND flash — the memory chips used in solid-state drives — is being pulled into that story whether it likes it or not. At CES, the company said it is retiring the WD Blue and WD Black names on its internal SSD lineup and moving to three “Optimus” tiers, with the top end positioned for AI PCs and workstations; “the SANDISK Optimus brand redefines what performance means,” marketing VP Heidi Arkinstall said. KitGuru
Sandisk Corporation completed its separation from Western Digital in February 2025 and began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SNDK, the company said at the time. The split gave investors a cleaner, single-name way to bet on flash memory as AI spending ripples through the supply chain.
But the rally is not risk-free. Memory and storage demand can turn fast, and a burst of price gains often pulls in supply or triggers customer pushback, leaving late buyers nursing sharp drawdowns.
The next clear catalyst is Sandisk’s fiscal second-quarter report on Jan. 29, with a conference call scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Pacific, the company said. Traders will be listening for any change in the company’s view on NAND pricing and on orders for higher-margin enterprise SSDs used in AI servers.
Macro could still jolt the tape: investors are watching for Friday’s U.S. government payrolls report as they gauge the path for Federal Reserve rate cuts, Reuters reported. For Sandisk, the bigger test is still Jan. 29 — and whether the numbers and outlook justify the week’s re-rating.
