NEW YORK, Jan 2, 2026, 11:44 ET — Regular session
- Sandisk shares jump nearly 12% in late morning trade, touching $267.65 intraday
- Storage and memory peers also rise as tech rebounds at the start of 2026
- Focus shifts to Sandisk’s Jan. 29 earnings call for pricing and demand signals
Shares of Sandisk Corp (SNDK) jumped nearly 12% on Friday, trading at $265.80 after touching an intraday high of $267.65. The stock swung between $242.00 and $267.65 as about 5.4 million shares changed hands in late morning trade.
The move puts Sandisk back on the front foot at the start of 2026, after tech stocks stumbled in the final sessions of 2025. Traders have treated the flash-storage maker as a direct play on AI-linked data-center spending, a theme that has driven sharp rotations across semiconductors and hardware.
U.S. stocks opened the year higher as technology shares rebounded, and investors weighed the outlook for interest rates and the economy. “The next Fed Chair is probably going to be much more dovish than Jerome Powell,” said Dennis Dick, chief market strategist at Stock Trader Network; investors are also watching next week’s labor-market data for signals on the Federal Reserve’s path. Reuters
Sandisk’s rally outpaced other storage and memory names. Micron Technology was up about 7.6%, while Western Digital gained about 7% and Seagate Technology added about 2.9%.
Sandisk develops storage devices and solutions built on NAND flash, a type of memory chip that keeps data even when power is off. NAND underpins solid-state drives, or SSDs, which store data without spinning disks and are widely used in PCs and data centers.
The company returned to public markets in February 2025 after separating from Western Digital, and Zacks Investment Research said Sandisk topped the S&P 500’s gainers list in 2025, up more than 560% since its debut. Zacks said consensus estimates call for fiscal 2026 earnings per share of $12.59, as pricing improves and enterprise customers buy more high-capacity SSDs.
Friday’s jump highlights how sensitive the stock remains to the memory cycle — periods of rising and falling chip prices — where sentiment can shift quickly as supply and demand move. That volatility can amplify gains, but it can also accelerate selloffs when pricing momentum fades.
Investors are watching whether demand from cloud providers holds up after the surge in AI infrastructure spending. They also track unit shipments — often measured in exabytes, or a trillion gigabytes — as a real-world gauge of how much storage Sandisk is selling.
Next on the calendar is Sandisk’s fiscal second-quarter earnings conference call on Jan. 29, when it is due to update investors on results and outlook. The company said the call will be held at 1:30 p.m. Pacific time (4:30 p.m. ET), with a webcast available on its investor site.
Traders will focus on guidance for pricing and supply, especially for data-center SSDs, and on any changes to production plans. Comments on costs and capacity also matter in NAND because fabs — chip factories — are expensive to build and run.
In the near term, the stock’s ability to hold recent gains will be watched closely after the sharp start-of-year move. A steady trade into the close would suggest dip-buyers remain active; a fade would test how much of the rally is momentum versus longer-term positioning.
Sandisk remains one of the most closely watched ways to play storage demand tied to AI data centers. For the rest of Friday’s session, investors will look for confirmation from broader tech and semiconductor trading, and for any fresh company updates ahead of the Jan. 29 results.
