⚡️ Friends, SanDisk ($SNDK ) really has people fooled. Last year, it was still a subsidiary of Western Digital, dragged down by HDDs, valued as a cyclical stock, roughly 10 times PE, just getting by.

In February this year, it split off and went public independently, and the change was dramatic. In less than 15 months, from a few dozen dollars to over 1,500, market cap broke 200 billion, surpassing its parent company. The increase this year is nearly 500%, while neighboring NVIDIA only rose about 70%.

Last week’s earnings report showed revenue up 251% year-over-year, gross margin at 78.4%, earnings per share at $23.41, far exceeding expectations. It’s not just meeting targets, it’s crushing them. Storage has shifted from an AI sidekick to a bottleneck-level core component.

The logic has changed: AI has entered multimodal and reasoning stages, data throughput is exploding, and enterprise SSDs have become a bottleneck. Jensen Huang said that storage is an untapped market, and now it’s starting to realize that.

The differentiation is also clear: NAND (SanDisk) +250%, HBM (Micron Technology) +196%, HDD only +40%. Capital has already aligned.

More importantly, long-term contracts: SanDisk has locked in about $42 billion in minimum revenue plus $11 billion in guarantees, making storage the first time somewhat detached from cyclical stocks and moving toward growth stocks. Valuation-wise, the current PE is 43 (seems expensive), but the forward PE is about 19 (still acceptable).

Some people saw this early: Leopold Aschenbrenner bought at around ~$112, now holding nearly $1.5 billion; on-chain trader yixie10 used high leverage to go long and made a huge profit.

The question now is whether the $1,400+ price can still be chased. The bullish logic is straightforward: Wall Street’s target price is $2,000, and if AI continues to burn storage, some even shout $3,000; but the risks are very real: Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, Kioxia could see prices collapse with expansion, and demand is still fundamentally squeezed out by AI, as consumer electronics have not truly recovered.

This is a faith stock: if you believe the AGI path is valid and that storage demand will explode, you can hold long-term; if not, current levels are just a typical high point.

Sometimes, the most boring places are the least crowded. But this time, AI’s decade might just be beginning, and the story of storage is only just being awakened.

This article is free of charge, just personal sharing!