Sandisk Has Gone From Under $50 to Above $1,400 in a Year. Can the Run Continue?

A year ago, shares of Sandisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) traded below $50. As of this writing, they sit above $1,400 -- a gain of more than 3,000% in 12 months, and one of the biggest runs anywhere in the market.

That figure actually understates how hot the stock has been. Shares hit a record high of $2,354.39 earlier this summer before pulling back sharply.

A move like that usually means a mania or an earnings explosion. For Sandisk, it has mostly been the second one. But this is still the memory business, and the stock's second year looks much harder to handicap than its first.

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The earnings behind the moonshot

Sandisk makes NAND flash memory, the storage chips inside everything from phones to the solid-state drives that data centers run on. For years, that was a brutal boom-and-bust business. Then the artificial intelligence (AI) build-out collided with tight supply, and storage prices took off.

The company's results tell the story in three acts. In the fiscal third quarter of 2025, Sandisk generated $1.7 billion of revenue with a 22.5% gross margin. By the fiscal second quarter of 2026 (the period ended Jan. 2, 2026), revenue had grown to $3.0 billion and gross margin had climbed to 50.9%. Then, in the fiscal third quarter of 2026, revenue nearly doubled sequentially to $5.95 billion (up 251% year over year) while gross margin expanded to 78.4%.

The mix is shifting toward the best customers, too. Sandisk's data center revenue went from $197 million in the year-ago quarter to $1.5 billion in the fiscal third quarter, a more than sevenfold jump powered by demand for enterprise solid-state drives. Its bigger edge business, which supplies chips for devices like smartphones and PCs, nearly quadrupled year over year to $3.7 billion. Consumer revenue, the one soft spot, slipped 10% sequentially to $820 million.

Profits followed. The company posted fiscal third-quarter non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings per share of $23.41, compared to a small loss in the year-ago period. Through nine months of fiscal 2026, revenue has more than doubled year over year to $11.3 billion.

Even more, management guided for fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $7.75 billion to $8.25 billion with adjusted earnings per share of $30 to $33 -- yet another step up, and a forecast the company's next report will put to the test within weeks.

"This quarter marks a fundamental inflection point for Sandisk," said CEO David Goeckeler in the company's fiscal third-quarter earnings release.

Key to that claim is what the company calls its new business model: multi-year customer agreements backed by firm financial commitments. Sandisk ended the fiscal third quarter with three such agreements signed and has added two more since.

Priced as if the party ends

After all that, the growth stock trades at only about 8 times consensus earnings-per-share estimates for the next 12 months.

A multiple that low, on growth that fast, is the market saying it doesn't believe the earnings will stick. After all, memory has always been cyclical. Prices that triple on scarcity can fall just as fast when new supply arrives or demand pauses. And the same operating leverage that turned Sandisk's margin explosion into $23 of quarterly earnings per share would work in reverse.

Investors have already had a preview. Shares are down about 40% from their record high, and memory stocks broadly sold off again last week as investors questioned how long the AI spending boom can run.

With that said, there are real differences between this cycle and past ones. Those multi-year purchase commitments are designed to smooth the boom-and-bust pattern. The company also carries essentially no debt and ended the fiscal third quarter with $3.7 billion in cash.

If the new contracts hold pricing anywhere near current levels through 2027, today's valuation would prove far too low.

So, can the run continue? Not the way it happened. The 3,000% phase came from a once-in-a-cycle collision of scarce supply and desperate demand, and the stock's 40% pullback suggests the market knows it. From here, this is a bet on whether NAND pricing and those new commitments hold up. For investors convinced they will, a small position sized for serious volatility could make sense. Personally, I'd want to see the new business model prove itself (and the market demand hold up) for another quarter or two first -- even if that means paying a higher price later for more certainty.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.