Shares of NAND flash storage manufacturer Sandisk (SNDK +1.12%) rallied 27.6% on Tuesday.
While the stock was actually the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 index last year, that statistic doesn't appear to be slowing down Sandisk's meteoric rise in 2026 at all.
Today, more good news for the flash storage space came over the news wires and from CES, as the generative AI revolution is supporting an unprecedented demand boom for fast storage.
NASDAQ: SNDK
Key Data Points
SanDisk's meteoric rise continues
While investors have been rapidly factoring in NAND flash price increases for Sandisk since the middle of last year, more positive news continues to emerge on that front. Yesterday, industry publication Trendforce reported that the flash industry expects solid-state drive (SSD) pricing to increase over 40% in the first quarter. Keep in mind, this is just a quarter-over-quarter price increase, not even a year-over-year increase. Trendforce writes:
Meanwhile, disciplined capacity management by NAND Flash suppliers, along with robust server demand that is displacing other applications, is likely to increase contract prices across all NAND Flash product categories by 33–38%.
On top of the industrywide news, at last night's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) presentation, Nvidia (NVDA +0.91%) highlighted its new storage platform optimized for agentic AI inference, promising up to five times more power efficiency than traditional storage platforms. While neither SanDisk nor any other flash player was mentioned by name, more efficient storage likely means a significant increase in demand for AI-related inference servers, which will likely be packed with NAND flash storage as the preferred storage medium.
On top of an already-robust backdrop, Nvidia's new storage platform is likely to sustain and extend the current memory supercycle.
Image source: Getty Images.
An unprecedented boom
Memory prices appear to be spiking in an unprecedented fashion, with the recent surge beginning around mid-2025. That has been a somewhat delayed reaction to the AI boom that began in earnest in 2023, when Nvidia's sales experienced their initial surge.
Following a prolonged downturn in which memory and storage prices declined after the pandemic, it appears the expanding use cases of AI, particularly agentic inferencing, are driving an even bigger surge in demand for memory and storage, both within data centers and at the edge.
Eventually, supply will increase and catch up to this demand, and prices will fall, which should make investors cautious today. That being said, bringing new supply online will take time, so the large memory and storage players now seem set for at least a year or more of ultra-high profits.
