In August 2025, these shares were $41.50. Since then, they have been over $770. Most of this rise came in six months. The breakout in September 2025 could not have been clearer. If I had been aware of this breakout, it would have been a licence to print money. So, how do we find these breakouts in a timely fashion? It is not easy; if we can do it, wealth awaits.
There are two puzzles with Sandisk. Why did they climb so much between September 2025 and February 2026, and why didn’t they climb before?
It turns out that in February 2025 Sandisk was split out of Western Digital. This process was instigated by the CEO of the combined business, David Goeckeler, who, significantly, while presumably having a choice of which company he led, chose to be the CEO of Sandisk.
As you can see shares in Western Digital have done well since June 2026 but shares in Sandisk have exploded. Note the classic red line buy.signal for WDC in May 2025 followed by a spectacular new high breakout.
I think the explanation for the sideways trend in Sandisk after the split was that investors knew little about the company. You won’t be surprised to learn that Sandisk is an AI play.
In the quarter, revenue was $3 billion, up 31% sequentially, with non-GAAP earnings per share of $6.20. Artificial intelligence continues to drive a step change in demand, with data center and edge workloads expanding system complexity and storage content requirements. This shift, along with disciplined commercial actions and strategic capacity allocation, has strengthened our business results. Let me frame the NAND industry’s evolution before discussing our end markets. NAND is now recognized as indispensable to the world’s storage needs, driving a foundational shift in how commercial relationships between suppliers and customers are structured.
Supply certainty, longer planning horizons, and multiyear commitments are increasingly essential to support structural demand that extends beyond the traditional cyclical model of our market. As a result, we are engaged in discussions with customers to evolve from quarterly negotiations toward multiyear agreements with firmer commitments on supply and pricing, enabling better planning practices and more attractive returns. These changes would better align our planning cycles with customers’ demand profiles to our mutual benefit. Accordingly, our supply plans will continue to be designed around predictable, long-term demand at current and forecasted market prices. These dynamics reveal the true value of our NAND technology and reinforce the need for continued innovation and disciplined execution.
So, what is NAND technology?
NAND technology is a type of non-volatile flash memory that retains data without power, commonly used for high-density, cost-effective storage in SSDs, USB drives, and smartphones. It operates by trapping electrons in a floating gate to represent data, allowing for fast data transfer, durability, and high capacity without moving parts.
Applications: It is found in smartphones, tablets, computers, USB flash drives, memory cards, solid-state drives (SSDs), and data center infrastructure.
In the data center, we are at the center of a broad expansion in AI infrastructure. Enterprise SSD demand is accelerating across the ecosystem as AI workloads scale, with inference, in particular, driving a meaningful increase in NAND content per deployment. This momentum reflects deepening engagement with a wider range of customers building and deploying AI at scale, reshaping our data center business, which we expect to grow meaningfully in both the near and long term.
We are seeing strong adoption across all types of AI infrastructure builders, including cloud hyperscalers, edge and enterprise data centers, OEMs, and system integrators deploying AI at scale. Our technology has become a critical enabler of these deployments, delivering the performance characteristics required for optimized AI infrastructure. The breadth of customer adoption across the AI ecosystem underscores the strength of our technology and the depth of our product portfolio. Within hyperscalers, we have completed qualification of our PCIe Gen 5 high-performance TLC drives at a second hyperscaler and are on track to complete qualification at additional hyperscalers over the coming quarters, with Bix 8 TLC solutions soon thereafter.
This product is driving significant revenue growth across our data center portfolio, which was up 64% sequentially. Our Bix 8 QLC storage class product, code-named Stargate, continues advancing through with two major hyperscalers and is expected to begin shipping for revenue within the next several quarters, providing an additional tailwind for data center growth.
Looking ahead, we continue to see customer demand well above supply beyond calendar year 2026, which requires careful allocation planning and alignment with our customers.
Sandisk is on fire. No wonder investors are becoming increasingly excited. The fundamentals tick all our boxes: strong growth, great story, something new. The chart is extended but strong. I know – if only we had bought six months ago, but we are where we are. My reading is that the current chart configuration is explosively bullish. We shall see.
Sandisk’s old partner, Western Digital Corporation, is also going gangbusters.
The fundamentals are equally amazing.
As generative AI models become the norm and agentic AI scales to drive business productivity, it is clear that AI is becoming a true strategic enabler of business transformation. AI inference has also begun to take hold in many ways becoming the true AI workload with deployment to chat bots and virtual assistants and customer relationship management tools. Further innovations in physical AI are also accelerating quickly, generating increasingly larger multimodal models propelled by advancements in autonomous vehicles and robotics.
In all cases, it is data that is needed to fuel the entire AI process from training to inference to enable stronger models and sharper inference results. And as more data is generated and the value of data increases, the demand to store it is expanding at a rapid rate. As AI capabilities expand, cloud continues to grow as well, and both are driving the surge in demand for higher-density storage solutions. In this new era where AI and cloud dominate, Western Digital has taken a customer-focused approach to managing the strong demand by working closely with our hyperscale customers, ensuring that we deliver reliable, high-capacity drives at scale to give them the best performance and total cost of ownership.
We’ve definitely seen exabyte growth over the last few quarters in the low 20s, as you’ve highlighted. Actually, we see as the AI value changes from model training to inference, more data is going to get created as a result in order to enable the inference delivery, more data needs to get stored as a result of that data getting generated as well.
And if you look at the economics of being able to deliver inference at the right cost structure to drive mass scale adoption, again, a lot of that data that’s getting generated and require storage will be delivered — will be stored on hard drives as they are, as we’ve highlighted in the past, where hyperscalers really are masters of managing the economics and moving data across the different tiers of SSDs (Solid State Drives), HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) and tape as well. So from our perspective and the conversations that we’ve been having with our customers, inference is definitely going to drive a significant amount of data storage requirement, and that’s really positive for HDDs going forward.
Sandisk. SNDK
Ciena Corporation. CIEN
Palantir Technology. PLTR
Western Digital Corporation. WDC
Strategy – This Market Is Neither Bull, Nor Bear, But Turbulent
I am beginning to think my bull and bear analysis is too simplistic. Despite the increasingly negative background, shares like Sandisk and Western Digital Corporation have rocketed in the last six months. Ciena Corp, referenced by a subscriber, which I wrote about recently, is soaring. Both fundamentals and. chart are ragingly positive. On the basis that we have to start somewhere, I am recommending the shares.
I have also changed my mind about acting on the green line buy signal for Palantir. Incredible fundamentals plus a chart buy signal are an appealing combination. A yellow line buy signal would be better. You can wait for that or use it to buy some more.
