If You Invested $30,000 in Sandisk Stock at Its Spinoff, Here's How Much You'd Have Today (Hint: You'd Be a Millionaire)

Few stocks have delivered as compelling a performance over the past year or so as Sandisk (NASDAQ: SNDK). The memory specialist has delivered monster returns for investors who picked up shares shortly after its spinoff from Western Digital, which bought it in 2016.

If you had the foresight to invest $30,000 during the spinoff (which occurred on Feb. 24, 2025) and held on through the astonishing run that followed, the value of your stake would now be more than $1 million. That's an incredible gain in just over a year's time.

But for those investors who haven't already gotten into the stock, the question is, can Sandisk's run continue, or has it reached its peak?

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Sandisk is thriving thanks to rising memory chip prices

Sandisk makes NAND memory, which is primarily utilized for long-term data storage. Its products are mostly used to make solid-state drives (SSDs), which are used in data centers to house data and information. Sandisk and its peers don't have the production capacity to make enough NAND for SSDs to meet soaring data center demand. As a result, prices for these commodity components have soared, and Sandisk's revenues and profits have skyrocketed.

Sandisk is currently in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2026. For this period, Wall Street analysts expect 332% year-over-year revenue growth. For fiscal 2027, Wall Street analysts expect 118% growth. That demonstrates how much the prices of memory are soaring, and the shortage driving those price hikes could last for a long time as data center spending continues to ramp up.

A great source of insight about the future pace of data center expansion is Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). The world's largest company has its fingers on the AI build-out pulse, and is a close partner with every AI company. Those relationships are helping it plan to meet demand for its AI accelerators down the road. While the big four AI hyperscalers say they plan to lay out about $650 billion in data center capital expenditures during 2026, Nvidia told investors that their collective capex will top $1 trillion in 2027. Furthermore, by 2030, it expects global annual data center capital expenditures to reach $3 trillion to $4 trillion.

Those new data centers will need more than just an enormous quantity of AI accelerators -- they'll also need a ton of memory, which bodes well for the long-term outlook of Sandisk. In that context, investors shouldn't view it as some flash-in-the-pan company that rises massively one year, then plunges the next. Its business will have a ton of staying power as long as the AI data center build-out is ongoing and as long as the production capacity of memory-chip makers lags behind demand. Once the AI build-out slows, Sandisk's stock may fare poorly, but it could be many years before that happens. As a result, Sandisk's stock could still be a smart AI investment.

Keithen Drury has positions in Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia and Western Digital. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.