Sandisk Stock Draws Fresh Buy Rating: 'Not Your Father's Sandisk'

Rosenblatt Securities initiated coverage of Sandisk Corp. (NASDAQ:SNDK) on Monday with a Buy rating and a $2,400 price target, arguing the NAND flash maker has outgrown its reputation as a commodity storage supplier. Analyst Kevin Cassidy titled the note “This is Not Your Father’s Sandisk” and his $2,400 target sits roughly 37% above the $1,744.95 reference price in the report. SNDK stock is moving. See the chart and price action here. The AI Case for Flash Cassidy’s thesis rests on a shift in what buyers want from NAND. For decades, adoption followed density gains and falling cost per bit, but AI inference changes the calculus. Large models, longer context windows and agentic workloads generate persistent data sets that must be stored, retrieved and reused. Read Also: GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen Buys Another $26 Million of GME Stock Flash is emerging as a cheaper tier for KV-cache storage, pulling it physically closer to compute engines. Sandisk’s internal testing found inference systems using SSDs consumed about 75% less energy and delivered roughly 3x the throughput of setups relying only on volatile memory. Density still matters. Endurance, performance and supply certainty now matter alongside it — and those are attributes customers pay up for. Datacenter Takes Over The numbers behind the shift to datacenters are steep. Datacenter revenue climbed from $960 million in fiscal 2025 to $5.15 billion in fiscal 2026 — a 437% increase. Fourth-quarter datacenter revenue hit $2.98 billion, up 103% sequentially and 1,298% year over year. Cassidy models Sandisk’s datacenter revenue reaching $21.7 billion in fiscal 2027 and $28.6 billion in fiscal 2028, at which point it would represent roughly 48% of the company’s total. Those estimates exclude any contribution from high-bandwidth flash. Edge — covering PC, mobile, gaming and automotive — remains Sandisk’s larger business today at 60% of fiscal 2026 revenue. Higher memory prices are squeezing unit demand there, with management expecting mid-teens declines in both PC and smartphone units this calendar year. See More: Top Momentum Stocks Contracts Change the Downside The most distinctive piece of the bull case involves paper, not silicon. Sandisk has signed 10 new business model supply agreements with eight datacenter and edge customers, carrying weighted-average duration above four years. Those deals include quarterly volume commitments, fixed and variable pricing, price floors and ceilings, and financial guarantees. Minimum contracted revenue totals $93.9 billion at floor pricing, alongside $91.1 billion of pro forma remaining performance obligations and $16.5 billion of guarantees. Rosenblatt estimates the agreements cover more than half of fiscal 2027 bits and about two-thirds of fiscal 2028 bits. Cassidy believes the structure dampens the amplitude of the NAND cycle without eliminating it. Margins and Valuation Non-GAAP gross margin swung from 29.9% in the first quarter of fiscal 2026 to 84.6% in the fourth. Rosenblatt models 83.7% in fiscal 2027 and 80.2% in fiscal 2028 as pricing normalizes, and estimates fiscal 2030 earnings near $300 per share. The $2,400 target reflects 10 times the firm’s fiscal 2028 EPS estimate of $240 — a 30% discount to a 1.0x PEG ratio. The haircut accounts for execution risk and the chance NAND reverts to commodity-like pricing. SNDK Stock Price Activity: Sandisk stock was down 0.50% at $1757.80 during premarket trading Tuesday, according to Benzinga Pro market data. Read Also: Greenland Stocks Explode After Trump's Denmark Deal — GRML Up 245% Image: Shutterstock