Sandisk's eye-popping earnings forecast helps justify 1,400% stock surge

By Britney Nguyen

The storage maker's Q3 revenue guidance is almost 60% higher than Wall Street's consensus, and profit guidance more than double what analysts had expected

Sandisk's stock was surging on Thursday afternoon after the storage maker's outlook was well above Wall Street's forecast.

Sandisk's new revenue guidance is almost 60% higher, and a fresh profit outlook 150% higher, than what Wall Street expected, showing why the S&P 500's hottest stock is only getting hotter.

The storage maker said late Thursday it expects fiscal third-quarter revenue to come in between $4.4 billion and $4.8 billion. At the midpoint, that guidance is almost 60% higher than the $2.9 billion consensus on FactSet.

Sandisk (SNDK) also expects third-quarter adjusted per-share earnings between $12 and $14, which at the midpoint is more than 150% above analysts' expectations of just $5.11.

Sandisk's stock has been red-hot in the past 11 months. Since separating from Western Digital (WDC) last February, Sandisk shares have rocketed nearly 1,400%. They're up another 15% in Thursday's extended session.

The company has been a huge beneficiary of booming demand for memory and storage offerings due to artificial intelligence. This trend has given Sandisk strong pricing power.

On Thursday, the company reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $3 billion, up 61% from the previous year, and above the $2.7 billion that analysts expected. Sandisk reported adjusted earnings of $6.20 a share, which was up 404% from a year ago and compares with consensus for $3.62 a share.

"This quarter's performance underscores our agility in capitalizing on better product mix," Sandisk CEO David Goeckeler said in a statement, pointing to an acceleration in deployments of enterprise-level solid-state drives and strong demand "all at a time when the critical role that our products play in powering AI and the world's technology is being recognized."

See more: Here's how Sandisk's stock can follow its 1,000% surge with even more gains

Data-center revenue for the December quarter was up 64% sequentially to $440 million, which Sandisk attributed to strong adoption by artificial-intelligence data-center builders, customers' custom storage needs and tech companies scaling up their AI usage.

Earlier this month, Bernstein analyst Mark Newman named Sandisk as one of his top sector picks for the year. The "unprecedented" shortages of NAND memory are giving companies more power to raise prices, which he said creates upside in the short term for Sandisk and other memory and storage players.

As AI models continue to improve and expand, the larger training and inference workloads and need for nearline storage will be a boost for Sandisk, Newman said. Nearline storage is used for data that isn't being actively used, but that needs to be easily accessible.

Don't miss: Why Sandisk's stock just soared to its best day in 11 months

On Jan. 6, Sandisk's stock had its best day in 11 months, partly due to "bullish comments" from Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang about the importance of memory chips in the deployment of AI applications, Mizuho trading-desk analyst Jordan Klein previously told MarketWatch. Klein also pointed to commentary from Sandisk to its investors about strong demand and long-term agreements with customers.

-Britney Nguyen

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01-29-26 1820ET