Milpitas, California, April 27, 2026, 11:06 (PDT)
- Sandisk surged 7.4% to finish at $1,063.55 on Monday, with nearly 9.6 million shares changing hands.
- Melius Research started coverage with a Buy rating and set a $1,350 price target for two years from now, adding to a series of upbeat Wall Street forecasts.
- Sandisk Corporation releases its fiscal Q3 results on April 30. Options activity is picking up as traders brace for a sharp move.
Sandisk Corp climbed 7.4% on Monday, notching a record at $1,063.55. Analysts have lifted their targets, pointing to surging AI-fueled demand for data storage as a catalyst for the flash-memory heavyweight. That rally drove Sandisk’s market cap up to about $165.9 billion just before its earnings report this week.
Timing matters. Sandisk holds its fiscal Q3 earnings call this Thursday at 1:30 p.m. Pacific—an event set to reveal whether the NAND flash-memory rally still has momentum. NAND, the chip tech that allows data to persist without power, is what powers SSDs and related gear.
Sandisk shares leapt higher after its January outlook put third-quarter revenue between $4.40 billion and $4.80 billion, with non-GAAP diluted EPS forecast at $12 to $14. The same release showed second-quarter revenue rising 31% from the prior quarter to $3.03 billion. Data-center sales jumped 64%, fueled by heavy ordering from AI infrastructure players and big tech firms.
Melius analyst Ben Reitzes launched coverage on Sandisk and Micron Technology, giving both stocks Buy ratings. He set a two-year target of $1,350 for Sandisk and $700 for Micron. In his client note, Reitzes flagged what he described as an “AI memory cycle” that he expects could stretch to the end of the decade. He cites heavy appetite for high-bandwidth memory, DRAM, and NAND as the core drivers. Investing.com
Cantor Fitzgerald lifted its Sandisk price target to $1,400 from $1,000, maintaining its Overweight rating and citing robust demand across hyperscale cloud, consumer, and client segments. Morgan Stanley raised its own target as well, bringing it up to $1,100, per Investing.com.
That shift pulled up several other stocks. Micron finished Monday with a 4.9% gain, market data showed. Western Digital slipped 0.4%. It spun off Sandisk as a standalone public company back in February 2025, and Western Digital remains a storage cycle bellwether.
Sandisk shares have seen extra demand lately, thanks in part to index-related flows. Earlier this month, Nasdaq said Sandisk would join the Nasdaq-100 Index, replacing Atlassian, with the change effective before trading kicks off on April 20. The index itself features 100 of the biggest non-financial names trading on Nasdaq, and underpins more than 200 investment products holding $600 billion-plus.
Still, plenty of traders are jumping in, undeterred by hefty risk. Options markets put Sandisk’s implied earnings move at 16.57%—a hefty swing for a single session. Of all the mega-caps Benzinga tracked this week, none saw a bigger implied shift.
The main concern remains: memory’s old boom-bust swings are still alive. If supply picks up sooner than expected, or if AI-fueled data-center spending takes a breather, those strong prices could slip, putting rosy earnings targets at risk. In its January update, Sandisk flagged product mix and enterprise SSD deployments as key, while warning that demand can shift quickly once memory heats up.
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