Why is SanDisk stock up 4.5% before Wall Street opens on Monday morning?

SanDisk stock NASDAQ:SNDK climbed 4.5% in early US premarket trading on Monday, rebounding after a bruising selloff as investors returned to memory and semiconductor stocks.

The shares were up 4.5% at about 4:30 am ET on July 27. The market data showed a gain of roughly 5% before the opening bell.

The advance did not follow a new company announcement.

SanDisk’s investor-relations feed showed no fresh material news on Monday morning, leaving bargain hunting, improving market sentiment and confidence in tight NAND supply as the clearest drivers.

Friday’s rout brings buyers back to SanDisk stock

SanDisk stock dropped 10.8% on Friday to close at $1,436.56, reversing part of its extraordinary 2026 advance.

Micron fell about 7%, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index lost more than 4% as investors reduced exposure to crowded AI and memory trades.

Monday’s recovery extended beyond SanDisk. Marvell, Nvidia and other chip stocks rose as a pause in US-Iran fighting sent oil prices sharply lower, easing immediate concerns about inflation and interest rates.

The broad move suggests buyers were rotating back towards risk assets rather than responding to SanDisk-specific news.

Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore had already argued that the memory selloff created an entry point.

“This is not a normal cycle,” Moore said in a note cited by Business Insider, describing memory as “increasingly THE bottleneck” for AI infrastructure and agentic-computing systems.

His comments preceded Monday’s rise, so they should be viewed as context for dip-buying rather than a fresh catalyst.

Still, they help explain why investors were willing to revisit a stock that had just suffered a double-digit decline.

Also read: DRAM ETF inflows rise as Micron, SanDisk, SK Hynix, Samsung lead rally amid risks

Wall Street says the NAND shortage has further to run

SanDisk sells NAND flash for consumer devices and solid-state drives, but its increasingly important opportunity lies in enterprise storage.

AI data centres require storage capacity for models, training information and inference workloads, strengthening demand for high-capacity enterprise SSDs.

TrendForce said the NAND market remained undersupplied throughout 2026 because AI-related demand accelerated while manufacturers added little capacity.

It estimates a 4% to 5% supply deficit this year, with constraints expected to ease gradually only during the second half of 2027.

Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani reinforced the bullish case by raising his SanDisk price target to $3,100 from $1,400 and retaining an Outperform rating.

Barron’s reported that he believed investors were “underappreciating” the durability of earnings and free cash flow.

Daryanani argued that long-term customer agreements could provide better visibility into revenue, pricing and profits than investors usually receive from a commodity-memory supplier.

Citi also retained a $2,500 target and a positive short-term view, citing AI-driven demand for NAND and storage.

Those forecasts make Friday’s decline look like a valuation reset to bullish investors.

They do not eliminate risk, because SanDisk’s several-hundred-per-cent gain this year has left the shares sensitive to changing expectations.