SanDisk Beats Earnings but Stock Falls as AI Inference Drives Memory Demand
ryanshrout · x · 2026-08-07
Despite delivering strong financial results, SanDisk's stock price fell. Analyst Ryan Shrout provides an in-depth breakdown of the dynamics at play.
- Financials: SanDisk closed fiscal 2026 with an 84.6% non-GAAP gross margin, $8.97B in quarterly revenue, and $5.04B in adjusted free cash flow. Next quarter's revenue guidance is between $10.3B and $10.8B, with gross margins holding at 83%-85%.
- Market Logic: The stock drop reflects concerns over duration rather than quarterly performance. However, the memory industry is currently structurally undersupplied.
- AI Compute Impact: The industry's shift from training to inference is actually raising memory demand. Inference is fundamentally a memory capacity and bandwidth problem rather than raw FLOPS, driving demand for enterprise SSDs and high-bandwidth flash in data centers.
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