Viewed from one angle, Micron (MU +0.90%) and Sandisk (SNDK 1.98%) stocks look like competitors, both making NAND flash memory and battling for market share there, even as Sandisk makes inroads into Micron's high-bandwidth memory (HBM) DRAM market by offering its own "high-bandwidth flash" as an alternative.
But that's just one angle.
Viewed another way, Micron and Sandisk stocks seem joined at the hip, as when today, a new partnership and a pair of price target hikes for Micron stock immediately sent Sandisk stock up 4.7% through 11:50 a.m. ET.
Image source: Getty Images.
Micron's good news
This morning, Micron announced a "strategic" deal to supply computer memory to Anthropic, collaborating with the AI leader on memory and storage AI architecture design, and even investing in Anthropic directly.
Could Sandisk find a strategic partner of its own to match Micron's move? Perhaps. In the meantime, Sandisk can at least ride Micron's coattails thanks to a pair of price target hikes that Micron just received on Wall Street.
In back-to-back upgrades, first Bernstein SocGen Group analyst Mark Li nearly tripled his price target on Micron stock today to $1,300 per share, citing continued high demand for both HBM and solid-state (NAND) drives. Then Needham analyst N. Quinn Bolton posted a price target even higher -- $1,550 per share -- based on what he also sees as a "robust pricing environment" for memory in the artificial intelligence markets for training and inference.
NASDAQ: SNDK
Key Data Points
What this means for Sandisk
Insatiable demand for DRAM-based HBM will cause Micron's profits to "rise almost vertically this year," predicts Li, and to keep rising in 2027. While this is most obviously good news for Micron, high prices will likely encourage memory buyers to seek alternatives to DRAM.
And Sandisk will be right there waiting, advertising "high bandwidth flash" as the alternative.
