SanDisk (SNDK) shares climbed in pre-market trading after Rosenblatt analyst Kevin Cassidy initiated coverage with a Buy rating and a $2,400 price target.
Cassidy sees approximately 36% upside from SanDisk’s September 22 closing price of $1,766.64, citing AI infrastructure as a structural growth driver.
The analyst believes AI computing is creating an opportunity to make NAND storage “more system-critical” in AI infrastructure, shifting it away from commodity status.
Growing AI models are expected to drive demand for higher-density storage, while data-heavy AI inference workloads could increase the need for better storage performance.
Traditional NAND demand has largely come from consumer devices, PCs, and smartphones, but Cassidy expects AI workloads to fundamentally change that pattern.
He points to SanDisk’s BiCS8 and BiCS10 platforms as well suited to this opportunity, improving NAND density while helping control production costs.
SanDisk has collaborated with Kioxia on NAND technology for roughly 25 years, giving the company deep technical foundations that Cassidy views as a competitive advantage.
The company’s most recent earnings underscored that investor enthusiasm is backed by real financial performance, not just AI branding.
Fiscal Q4 sales reached $8.97 billion, up 51% sequentially and 372% year over year, while adjusted EPS hit $39.25 and gross margin expanded from 26.4% to an extraordinary 84.6%.
Data-center revenue more than doubled sequentially to $2.98 billion, helping full-year revenue rise 175% to $20.25 billion across the fiscal year.
SanDisk is also developing HBF technology that targets HBM-like read bandwidth with eight to 16 times the capacity, though commercial validation remains ahead.
At $1,766, shares trade at just 8.26 times consensus fiscal 2027 EPS estimates of $213.90, a restrained multiple for a stock that has climbed 644% this year.
The multiple falls further to 6.70 times fiscal 2028 EPS estimates of $263.49, while consensus revenue for fiscal 2027 stands at $48.95 billion.
Rosenblatt’s $2,400 target would value SanDisk at roughly 11.2 times fiscal 2027 earnings and approximately 9.1 times fiscal 2028 estimates.
Citi analysts separately project a worsening undersupply in the memory market through 2031, driven by AI development and continual learning demands.
Cassidy ranks No. 58 among 12,521 analysts tracked by TipRanks, carrying a 59% success rate and an average return per rating of 39% over a one-year period.
