Shares of Sandisk (SNDK -5.41%) were sharply lower on Monday, tumbling as much as 7.9%. As of 10:51 a.m. ET, the stock was still down 5%.
The semiconductor specialist plunged on calls for a slowdown in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) from an unlikely source.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
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In an essay published over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on the industry to slow the pace of AI development. He noted that "like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious." Amodei cited the" risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption." He pointed to the well-publicized hack of Hugging Face by OpenAI models as evidence of the need for prudence.
Other chief executives sided with Amodei, including Space Exploration Technologies, aka SpaceX, CEO Elon Musk, who said in a post on X, "Dario is right." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also joined the chorus, penning an essay of his own, calling for consistent rules to manage the risk posed by frontier models. He went on to say that a slower pace of AI development does "not mean stopping."
NASDAQ: SNDK
Key Data Points
So what does this have to do with Sandisk?
The semiconductor industry has experienced an unprecedented boon fueled by the mad rush to adopt AI -- and Sandisk has been one of the undeniable beneficiaries. The company's advanced high-bandwidth flash memory and solid-state drives are crucial components in AI training and inference (the running of AI systems once they have been trained).
This recent call for a slowdown has some fair-weather investors taking profits. That said, AI has a long road ahead. And at 21 times earnings, Sandisk represents a compelling opportunity.
