SanDisk Shares Fall 3% After 65% Collapse From June Peak
SanDisk shares fell 2.99% to close at $859.99 on Tuesday, 10 November 2026, extending one of the sharpest reversals in the US stock market this year. The flash-memory maker has now lost about 65% of its value since peaking in June, even though its sales have surged on demand for the storage behind artificial intelligence systems.
The drop came a day after the shares had bounced 6.2% to close at $886.51 on Monday, as Wall Street staged its strongest rally since April. Tuesday brought a colder mood: hotter-than-expected US inflation data pushed Treasury yields higher, the Nasdaq Composite fell 0.7%, and chip stocks were among the hardest hit. SanDisk traded in a wide range during the session, between $826.67 and $914.82, before settling lower.
Record sales, collapsing share price
The contrast between SanDisk's trading and its business could hardly be starker. When the company reported fiscal first-quarter 2027 results on 29 October, revenue had surged 378% year on year to $11.03 billion, with a non-GAAP gross margin of 85.1%, up from below 30% a year earlier. Data-centre revenue climbed 61% from the previous quarter to $4.8 billion, while revenue from edge devices rose 7% to $5.83 billion.
Management guided for second-quarter revenue of between $12.2 billion and $12.6 billion, with non-GAAP earnings of $55 to $57 per share before the stock split, and said it expected data-centre demand for memory bits to grow about 40% in calendar 2027. The company has also pointed to agreements with large customers including Meta Platforms and Dell Technologies.
Yet the shares have fallen by more than half from their peak, and they remain about 62% below their 52-week high of $2,354.39. The slide reflects a familiar fear in the memory-chip industry: that today's shortage, and the pricing power it brings, will not last.
Why investors are nervous
Memory chips are famously cyclical. Strong demand and tight supply push prices up, manufacturers rush to build new capacity, and the extra supply eventually arrives just as demand cools, sending prices and profits down sharply. Analysts covering SanDisk have warned that this cycle may be no different, even with AI infrastructure spending running at historic levels.
Several developments have fed the nerves in recent weeks. OpenAI has delayed its stock market listing, while so-called neocloud firms such as CoreWeave have reportedly struggled to raise money in debt markets. If funding for AI data centres tightens, spending on the memory chips that fill them could slow too. SanDisk also guided for sequential revenue growth of only around 10% in its fiscal second quarter, slower than the 23% sequential growth it reported in the first quarter, a deceleration that has disappointed some investors.
On paper, the shares look cheap. SanDisk trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of about 3.5, far below the wider market. But that figure rests on earnings forecasts that assume today's unusually wide margins hold. If annual revenue were to fall back towards $10 billion and operating margins were to collapse as pricing power faded, the same shares would look expensive, a point made by analysts at the Motley Fool in an assessment published on 10 November.
Eight-for-one split due on 19 November
SanDisk is pressing ahead with an eight-for-one stock split, with the new shares payable to shareholders after the market closes on Thursday, 19 November. The split will cut the share price to roughly one-eighth of its current level and multiply the number of shares in issue, but it changes nothing about the value of the company or its underlying business.
Split-adjusted guidance puts second-quarter non-GAAP earnings at $6.88 to $7.13 per share. For all the recent falls, the shares are still up 262% since the start of the year, according to MarketBeat data, a reminder of how far they had climbed before the correction. The question now is whether the memory boom can last long enough to justify even today's much lower price. Investors will get their next hard evidence when SanDisk reports its fiscal second-quarter results in January.
