Sandisk $SNDK ( ▼ 0.46% ) is trying to pull off something the S&P 500 basically never sees. After posting a ridiculous +559% return in 2025 (best in the entire index), it’s already up another ~+72% in 2026 with the year barely started.
That’s not just “hot start” territory. That’s “are we watching history repeat?” territory.
Back to back champ (rare territory)
From what the research suggests, no stock has ever finished #1 in the S&P 500 two years in a row, especially in the modern era. Even monster winners like AppLovin and Palantir came close, but couldn’t repeat.
That’s what makes Sandisk’s start so insane. It’s already beating roughly 500 of the biggest US stocks again.
The real question is why this specific stock keeps outrunning the entire pack.
Why Sandisk keeps ripping
The simple story is: flash storage is becoming an AI bottleneck.
Sandisk came back as a stand-alone company after splitting from Western Digital in February 2025, and investors love it as a clean pure-play on NAND demand. AI models aren’t just compute hungry, they’re data hungry. Hyperscalers need massive storage for training data, deployments, retrieval, and scaling.
NAND sits right in the pipeline.
That positioning matters because markets don’t just want “AI exposure” anymore. They want the cleanest exposure.
Why SNDK is outrunning the rest of memory
Yes, Western Digital $WDC ( ▼ 0.6% ) , Seagate $STX ( ▲ 1.13% ) , and Micron $MU ( ▲ 5.14% ) have all been strong.
But Sandisk has the cleanest positioning in flash storage, and markets are rewarding the pure “AI storage leverage” angle harder than the broader memory basket.
Bottom line
Sandisk is doing the impossible thing: trying to repeat as the #1 S&P 500 stock.
History says it probably won’t happen. But this AI storage cycle has been anything but normal, and Sandisk is still the poster child.