Why SanDisk stock is surging 6% today, making 30%+ gains in this week

SanDisk SNDK shares extended their recent rally on Friday after fresh bullish calls from Wall Street added to optimism surrounding the company's long-term artificial intelligence strategy.

The stock climbed about 6% during Friday's session, marking its fifth consecutive day of gains and taking its weekly advance to roughly 34%.

The latest move follows the company's investor day on Thursday, where management outlined ambitious financial targets and highlighted how AI-driven demand could reshape the NAND flash memory market over the coming years.

Analysts said SanDisk's growing exposure to AI infrastructure and its shift toward long-term customer agreements could help reduce the cyclical nature of the memory business while supporting stronger profitability.

JPMorgan resumes coverage with bullish outlook

JPMorgan resumed coverage of SanDisk on Friday with an Overweight rating and a price target of $2,250, implying about 47% upside from the stock's previous closing price.

The bank had previously suspended coverage due to internal policy restrictions.

The renewed optimism came after SanDisk presented its long-term strategy at its investor day.

The company forecast mid-to-high-teen annual revenue growth between fiscal 2028 and 2030, alongside adjusted gross margins of around 80% and adjusted operating margins of approximately 75%.

JPMorgan analyst Harlan Sur said SanDisk is reshaping its business model to improve margins and lessen exposure to swings in memory demand.

Sur wrote that the company "is in many respects uniquely positioned to capture the ongoing structural inflection in NAND demand driven by growth in AI inference."

The analyst pointed to the rapid expansion of inference workloads, where trained AI models process information and generate responses, as a major catalyst for NAND flash demand.

That trend has prompted cloud providers and semiconductor companies to invest heavily in AI infrastructure.

SanDisk itself projects the NAND flash market will expand to $300 billion this year before approaching $500 billion in 2027, up sharply from an estimated $70 billion in 2025.

AI data centers create new growth opportunities

Citi Research also reiterated its positive stance on the stock.

Analyst Asiya Merchant maintained a Buy rating and a $2,100 price target, arguing that AI data centers are becoming SanDisk's primary growth engine as inference workloads continue to increase.

Merchant highlighted another emerging opportunity in key-value (KV) caching, a memory optimization technique used by large language models.

As AI models process prompts, they generate key-value pairs that allow previous context to be reused instead of recalculating information repeatedly.

Traditionally, this cache has been stored in expensive high-bandwidth memory or DRAM.

However, Merchant said growing AI workloads are making those memory technologies increasingly expensive and capacity constrained.

Data centers are therefore shifting portions of KV cache to NAND flash storage, where it can be retained for much longer at significantly lower cost.

According to Merchant, this transition could create another important source of long-term demand for SanDisk's products.

Long-term contracts boost visibility

Analysts also pointed to changes in SanDisk's commercial strategy as another reason for growing confidence.

Merchant noted that the company is moving away from a short-term sales model toward long-term customer agreements, a shift expected to provide greater revenue visibility and improve financial predictability.

The company's latest investor presentation similarly emphasized building longer-duration relationships with customers as AI infrastructure spending accelerates.

Other Wall Street firms also became more optimistic following the event.

RBC Capital raised its price target on SanDisk to $1,600 from $1,300, while Wedbush maintained its $2,000 price target.