SanDisk is up tonight—let me tell you something more down-to-earth: your next phone, or the next solid-state drive you buy, will most likely be more expensive.
That’s because AI data centers are fighting over high-performance flash memory, pushing up the price of NAND chips. In the last quarter, SanDisk’s revenue was about $9.97 billion, up 51% quarter-over-quarter. It said that two-thirds of this growth came from “price increases”—not selling more, but selling at higher prices.
Before, SanDisk was one of those cyclical stocks that basically moved up and down with storage prices. But in its investor day presentation, it pitched a new story: in the AI era, it’s infrastructure—and it even promised that in the future it will return 100% of excess cash to shareholders.
For ordinary people, the real-world feeling is this: once AI takes off, the first thing to get pricier isn’t the graphics card—it’s the chip that stores data. You either check the prices of drives and memory right now, or you wait and then get hit with the sting the next time you upgrade your phone.
That’s because AI data centers are fighting over high-performance flash memory, pushing up the price of NAND chips. In the last quarter, SanDisk’s revenue was about $9.97 billion, up 51% quarter-over-quarter. It said that two-thirds of this growth came from “price increases”—not selling more, but selling at higher prices.
Before, SanDisk was one of those cyclical stocks that basically moved up and down with storage prices. But in its investor day presentation, it pitched a new story: in the AI era, it’s infrastructure—and it even promised that in the future it will return 100% of excess cash to shareholders.
For ordinary people, the real-world feeling is this: once AI takes off, the first thing to get pricier isn’t the graphics card—it’s the chip that stores data. You either check the prices of drives and memory right now, or you wait and then get hit with the sting the next time you upgrade your phone.