After hitting a high at the end of June, Sandisk's (SNDK +13.52%) stock price has fallen 46%. That's a major drop for the memory stock, which captured the market's attention this year. It had gained 6,400% from its price in February 2025, when it was spun off from Western Digital, through its June high.
Memory is still a hot commodity, one that's driving up prices for artificial intelligence (AI) since it's in short supply. So why is Sandisk stock falling?
Image source: Sandisk.
Is NAND demand here to stay?
Sandisk is one of the few makers of NAND flash memory, a memory product that can store data in an off state (saving energy). This is a critical part of the generative AI process, which requires a range of memory products to store vast troves of data and run inference simultaneously. Because it uses less energy, it is in high demand. NAND, specifically, is in short supply, driving up costs and generating high revenue for Sandisk.
In the fiscal 2026 fourth quarter (ended July 3), revenue increased an incredible 372% year over year. For the full year, revenue increased 175%, driven by a 437% increase in data center revenue and a 195% increase in its edge segment, which includes devices like smartphones and PCs. Consumer segment revenue rose 29%.
Memory has historically been a boom-and-bust industry, with a buildup of demand before the technology evolves. Sandisk's management is confident that this time it really is different, since AI is here to stay, and that means large language models (LLMs), data centers, and inference all the time. "AI is fundamentally a memory-centric, storage-intensive problem, and it is reshaping the demand equation for NAND," the company said.
What could change, though, is how it's all done. AI in its current form has only been around for about three years, and the big LLMs like Alphabet's, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Anthropic's Claude haven't been mining data for all that long. If other areas of AI technology speed up, or more cost-effective solutions are developed, memory prices could get slashed.
Is this an opportunity to buy on the dip?
At the current price, Sandisk stock trades at only 17 times trailing 12-month earnings. That looks like a dirt cheap bargain for a profitable company growing as fast as Sandisk. Clearly, the market has worries.
NASDAQ: SNDK
Key Data Points
On a price-to-earnings basis, this is close to as cheap as Sandisk has ever been since it became net income positive. It could be worth taking a small position at this price, as long as you have a healthy appetite for risk. Keep in mind that there could be plenty of volatility, but also that the company has a robust consumer business outside of AI that adds stability.
