SanDisk’s Volatile Week: A 12% Decline, a 3.4% Rebound, and Analyst Targets Soaring Past $3,000

Even as SanDisk’s shares took a battering this week, Wall Street analysts were busily revising their price targets upward—in one case nearly doubling them. The divergence between price action and professional expectations has become the defining feature of the NAND flash maker’s recent trading.

The sell-off began on Monday after SK Hynix issued a weak near-term outlook for memory chips, dragging the entire storage and AI semiconductor sector lower. SanDisk’s stock tumbled 12.63% to close at €1,470. By Tuesday, however, a rebound was underway: the stock rallied 3.4% to €1,520, recovering some of the lost ground. The volatility has been extreme, with the annualised 30-day reading hitting 141.28%—a reflection of the daily swings that have become routine in the memory chip space.

Despite the turbulence, SanDisk remains up more than 600% since the start of 2026, though it has slipped 16.48% over the past month. The current price sits 26.21% below the 52-week high of €2,060 reached on June 22, but still 16.92% above the low of €1,300 recorded on July 7. The relative strength index of 47.1 points to a neutral reading—neither overbought nor oversold.

Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SANDISK?

Amid the market carnage, two prominent analysts have doubled down on SanDisk. Goldman Sachs’ James Schneider raised his price target from $1,200 to $2,200, maintaining a buy rating. He expects the company’s adjusted earnings for 2026 to come in nearly 30% above consensus, driven by surging orders from large cloud providers. Even more aggressive is Evercore’s Amit Daryanani, who lifted his target from $1,400 to $3,100. He argues that AI-driven demand for memory chips will outstrip supply well into next year and possibly beyond, extending the profit cycle longer than the market currently prices in. Not everyone shares this optimism—skeptics question whether the enormous capital spending on AI infrastructure will ultimately justify the current valuations, a debate that has weighed on the entire semiconductor sector.

Underpinning the bull case are two powerful fundamentals. SanDisk reported third-quarter revenue of $5.95 billion—nearly double the prior quarter—with its data-centre business surging 233% year-on-year to $1.47 billion at a gross margin of 78.4%. Management guided fourth-quarter revenue between $7.75 billion and $8.25 billion, citing continued AI infrastructure buildout and rising prices. More importantly, the company has secured roughly $62 billion in guaranteed minimum revenue from newly signed long-term supply agreements, providing a rare level of planning stability in the notoriously cyclical memory industry.

SanDisk has been an independent company since its spin-off from Western Digital on February 24, 2025. Since then, it has refocused exclusively on flash and storage technology, rebranding its SSD product lines in January from WD’s “Blue” and “Black” to “SanDisk Optimus” and “Optimus GX.” Western Digital retains a stake now worth around $1 billion and plans to reduce it further. As the tug-of-war between short-term sector weakness and long-term structural demand plays out, traders will be watching not only SanDisk’s own results but also production figures from Asian competitors for the next clue on the NAND cycle.