Sandisk Stock Sinks 8% as Wall Street Keeps Raising Price Targets

Sandisk stock sank as much as 9.3% Monday before closing down 8.2%, dragged into a memory-sector sympathy selloff after brokerage notes warned that South Korean rival SK Hynix could miss operating profit estimates by as much as 8%. Shares of the NAND flash memory maker (NASDAQ: SNDK) closed at $1,753.69, roughly 25% below the all-time high of $2,354.39 the stock touched less than a month earlier.

Goldman Sachs and Evercore ISI did not blink. Both firms raised their price targets this week to levels far above Monday’s close, betting the AI-driven NAND shortage still has room to run, even as a newly listed rival now gives investors a second way to make the identical bet.

Sandisk Shares Sink in a NAND Sympathy Selloff

Monday’s drop traced back to Seoul. Brokerage notes flagged the possibility that SK Hynix could miss operating profit forecasts by as much as 8%. The South Korean chipmaker had listed its own shares on Nasdaq just three days earlier. That soured sentiment across the entire NAND and DRAM complex, and Micron Technology and Western Digital fell alongside Sandisk.

Sandisk shares swung between $1,701.01 and $1,836.51 during the session before settling at $1,753.69, a close that left the company valued at $259.7 billion. Trading volume ran light for a drop this size. Only 5.42 million shares changed hands, well under the stock’s 12.81 million daily average, a pattern more consistent with profit-taking than panic.

A broader risk-off mood didn’t help. Benzinga reported the stock down more than 5% in premarket trading alone, part of a wider pullback tied to renewed tension in the Middle East.

Wall Street Keeps Chasing a Moving Target

The selloff did nothing to cool Wall Street’s enthusiasm. Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider lifted his price target to $2,200 from $1,200 on July 6 and reaffirmed his buy rating. He expects Sandisk’s adjusted 2026 earnings to beat consensus by nearly 30%, powered by a surge in orders from cloud computing providers.

Evercore ISI’s Amit Daryanani went further this week, raising his target to $3,100 from $1,400, a jump of more than 120%. Daryanani argued the current profit boom will last longer than most investors expect, with AI-driven memory demand outpacing supply into next year and possibly beyond.

Those two moves fit a pattern. BofA, Cantor Fitzgerald, Mizuho and Susquehanna have all raised their targets in recent weeks too, with Susquehanna’s $3,250 now the highest on the Street. Across 22 analysts, the average target sits at $2,035, with 18 buy ratings, three holds and a single sell.

The bullish case rests on pricing power Sandisk had already been flexing. The company moved to double prices on high-capacity 3D NAND for enterprise SSDs earlier this year, anticipating hyperscalers would pay top dollar for storage as AI infrastructure spending accelerated.

Why Analysts Can’t Agree on What Sandisk Is Worth

Sandisk’s 22 covering analysts are split by more than $2,000 a share, from a low target of $1,000 to a high of $3,250. Retail traders are just as divided. Reddit traders sit at just 28% bullish on the stock even as mainstream financial news coverage skews 63% bullish, according to sentiment tracker Adanos, which pulls from Reddit, X and news outlets.

Part of the split traces to macro nerves that have nothing to do with NAND. Rising expectations of Federal Reserve rate hikes have rattled risk assets broadly this month, the same pressure behind Bitcoin’s slide from its $126,000 record as traders repriced Fed policy across every high-flying asset at once.

You needn’t have an economics Ph.D. to know that’s a recipe for higher prices.

Axios markets reporter Matt Phillips wrote that in a July 6 piece on the memory chip boom, describing a semiconductor market with fixed supply colliding head-on with AI-driven demand.

Not everyone is convinced the math holds at these prices. One Yahoo Finance analysis flagged Sandisk’s 60 times trailing earnings multiple, its dependence on Kioxia Corporation, a Japanese NAND flash maker that jointly runs Sandisk’s fabrication plants, and its short track record as a standalone company. That analysis argued Micron’s owned factories and locked-in supply contracts make it the safer of the two memory stocks to hold through any demand wobble.

SK Hynix’s Nasdaq Debut Complicates Sandisk’s Story

SK Hynix started trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SKHY on July 10, in what TechTimes described as the largest American depositary receipt listing in US market history. It matters for Sandisk because SK Hynix is the world’s largest maker of High Bandwidth Memory, the premium AI-chip memory format, and its arrival hands US investors a second direct way to bet on the same shortage that has driven Sandisk’s rally.

SK Hynix’s own chief executive said last week the memory shortage could stretch past 2030. That forecast cuts both ways. It backs the bull case for pricing power, but it also means SK Hynix now gets to capture that pricing power alongside Sandisk, not instead of it.

Supply isn’t loosening either. Samsung and SK Hynix have both cut NAND wafer output to shift capacity toward HBM: Samsung from about 4.9 million wafers in 2024 to 4.68 million in 2025, SK Hynix from 1.9 million to 1.7 million. Micron’s next new factory isn’t expected online until 2027 at the earliest.

S&P Global Market Intelligence sees Sandisk revenue climbing 113% to $15.7 billion this fiscal year, with bit shipments up 23% and average selling prices up 77%. The AI-infrastructure spending behind all of it keeps expanding. Nvidia itself just hit a $5.1 trillion valuation even as its China chip sales evaporated, and hyperscalers are still building the data centers that consume Sandisk’s memory.

Memory’s Boom-Bust History

Sandisk’s own numbers show why analysts hedge their optimism. The company has swung from billion-dollar profits to billion-dollar losses before, all within the past four fiscal years.

1. Fiscal 2022: The NAND business, then still part of Western Digital, earned a $1 billion net profit during the last memory upcycle.
2. Fiscal 2023: Prices collapsed as supply caught up with demand, and the business swung to a $2 billion net loss.
3. Fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2025: The unit stayed unprofitable, still working through the prior downturn.
4. February 2025: Western Digital completed the spinoff, and Sandisk began trading on its own.
5. Fiscal 2026: The AI-driven NAND shortage flipped the cycle again, and quarterly profit returned in a big way.

Previous memory supercycles followed a similar script. William Ebiefung, a Motley Fool contributing writer, noted that past surges tied to the 1990s PC boom and the 2010s smartphone boom eventually “ended in sharp crashes as supply caught up to demand and prices cratered.” Nothing about the current cycle repeals that history. What’s different this time is how Sandisk has chosen to sell into it.

The Contracts Built to Survive the Next Bust

Sandisk signed five multi-year supply agreements, which it calls New Business Model contracts, with AI and hyperscaler customers across its fiscal third and early fourth quarters. Three of those deals alone carry a remaining performance obligation of about $42 billion, backed by more than $11 billion in enforceable financial guarantees.

The contracts lock in fixed or range-bound pricing for three to five years, and they now cover more than a third of Sandisk’s fiscal 2027 bit supply. That’s a floor that didn’t exist heading into the memory downturns of 2018 or 2021.

• Roughly two-thirds of Sandisk’s output still sells at open-market prices, which can fall as fast as they rose.
• The company still leans on Flash Ventures, its manufacturing joint venture with Kioxia.
• Samsung and SK Hynix are adding capacity even while favoring HBM production, and any pivot back toward NAND would narrow the shortage faster than bulls expect.
• Consumer-segment shipment volumes have been slipping even as higher prices keep that revenue line growing on paper.

Institutional money is still feeling out the story. 546 institutional investors added Sandisk shares last quarter while 259 trimmed their positions, according to regulatory filings tracked by Quiver Quantitative.

Samsung, which profits from the same shortage, has used its own chip earnings to cushion smartphone price increases elsewhere in its business, one sign of how far the memory squeeze has spread beyond data centers. Wedbush Securities analyst Matt Bryson has already raised his own price target ahead of earnings, citing double-digit NAND price gains and continued demand.

Sandisk reports fiscal fourth-quarter results on August 5, the next hard number in a year that has produced nothing but extreme ones.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Sandisk stock carries high volatility and valuation risk typical of cyclical semiconductor equities. Figures cited are accurate as of publication on July 14, 2026. Consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.