Sandisk $SNDK ( ▼ 2.76% ) shares pushed higher early Monday after Morgan Stanley delivered a massive price target hike, lifting its target from $273 to $483. With the stock trading around $473, the move brings Morgan Stanley closer to where the market already is, while reaffirming its long-standing “overweight” rating first issued in March 2025.
The jump may not be the last. Sandisk’s rally has been so aggressive that Wall Street’s average price target of $394 is now badly lagging reality.
From Thumb Drives to Market Leader
Once known mainly for USB thumb drives, Sandisk has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the NAND memory boom. The company was the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 last year after joining the index in November, and its shares are now up an eye-popping 1,255% over the past 12 months.
Most of that upside has come since September, as investors woke up to how critical NAND storage has become in the AI era.
AI Data Centers Are Eating the NAND Supply
NAND has long been treated as a low-margin, commodity part of the semiconductor world. That perception is changing fast. Demand from AI data centers, especially for enterprise solid state drives, has exploded. These eSSDs use significantly more NAND than consumer storage products and are rapidly soaking up global supply.
Morgan Stanley highlighted that just two cloud customers have ordered close to 10% of global NAND supply for all of 2025, tightening not only the enterprise market but consumer markets as well. In other words, AI is not just lifting demand at the high end, it is reshaping the entire NAND landscape.
For Sandisk, that shift has turned a once sleepy storage business into one of the most powerful momentum stories in semiconductors.