Why Sandisk Stock Popped After the SpaceX IPO

Sandisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) stock surged 6.6% through 12:05 p.m. Monday -- and for a reason that may surprise you.

In a note out this morning, Canadian private equity shop Lynx Equity told investors that even though the SpaceX IPO is over, and even after the space company's shares are up 31%, there's still a way for investors to make money on the SpaceX IPO:

By buying Sandisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) stock.

Image source: Getty Images.

SpaceX is flush with cash now

SpaceX made history last week, both scoring a gigantic valuation (currently $2.3 trillion -- quite a lot for a space stock with no profits) and raising $75 billion in cash.

Now SpaceX will have to figure out how to deploy all this cash to keep its growth rate going. And here's the thing: Lynx thinks SpaceX will spend quite a lot of this cash on semiconductors.

While still thought of by most investors as a space company, you see, the gigantic tech company that IPO'ed last week is really much more of an AI stock. Indeed, while the entire space launch market is currently valued at single-digit billions per year, at least some investors believe that SpaceX's AI business could eventually be worth $30 trillion annually.

What this means for Sandisk

For SpaceX to come anywhere near fulfilling this dream, however, it's going to need to build a huge AI business -- and spend heavily on AI chips and the memory chips that support AI inference work by those chips.

This means more money flowing to Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), for example (which is in fact Lynx's favorite play on SpaceX), and also more money flowing to Sandisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) as well.

The best news of all? Even valued at 23x sales, Sandisk stock is still 5x cheaper than SpaceX!

Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.