TLDR
- SanDisk CTO Alper Ilkbahar confirmed the company is developing High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF), aimed at the AI inference market, with samples expected late 2025 and full product in 2026.
- The company has locked in five-year supply agreements worth a combined $42B, backed by over $11B in financial guarantees.
- Barclays upgraded SNDK to Overweight and raised its price target to $2,300 from $1,200, citing SanDisk’s contracting approach.
- SNDK rose nearly 3% intraday following the Barclays upgrade and is up over 4,000% in the past 12 months.
- Global NAND memory prices are forecast to rise at least another 250% through 2026, according to Omdia.
SanDisk (SNDK) is trading near its 52-week high after Barclays raised its price target to $2,300 and upgraded the stock to Overweight. The stock rose close to 3% intraday on the news.
Barclays analyst Tom O’Malley called SanDisk “the most aggressive and structurally innovative in its contracting approach” in a note to clients.
The upgrade follows the revelation that SanDisk has secured five-year supply agreements with multiple customers that could total more than $42B. Three contracts signed last quarter carry minimum contractual revenue of roughly $42B, with financial guarantees exceeding $11B across five signed deals.
The longest contracts run to 2031. They feature near-term fixed pricing that shifts to variable rates over time, allowing SanDisk to capture upside if NAND prices climb.
Barclays noted the contract structure fundamentally changes how memory players allocate business and reduces downside exposure for SanDisk. O’Malley added that the firm sees “memory/storage as the most attractive vertical below accelerators.”
High-Bandwidth Flash: The Next Big Bet
SanDisk CTO Alper Ilkbahar told Nikkei Asia the AI-driven memory crunch is not going away. As large language models grow more complex, they demand more memory — not just compute power.
He pointed to key-value cache systems, which let models draw from prior inputs to speed up outputs. These require large memory loads. Some LLMs also run multiple smaller expert models simultaneously, which adds further memory demand on top of GPU requirements.
To meet this, SanDisk has developed what it calls High-Bandwidth Flash, or HBF. While High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is now a standard in AI computing, Ilkbahar believes HBF will be the critical component for AI inference workloads.
“We believe the next big thing is going to be HBF,” Ilkbahar said. Sample dies are expected by the end of this year, with a full product — including controllers — planned for next year.
Supply Deals Unlike Anything Seen Before
Ilkbahar also noted the unusual nature of these supply deals. Long-term purchase agreements have existed in the industry before, but nothing at this scale or commitment level.
“We would have purchase agreements, but it would typically be on different terms and not ever this long and never committed as strongly as we have right now, that I’m aware of,” he said.
The AI compute boom has driven a global shortage of both DRAM and NAND flash. Memory prices are forecast to rise at least 250% through 2026, according to research firm Omdia.
SNDK is up more than 4,000% over the past 12 months and is currently trading near its all-time high. The stock was at $2,300 price target territory following the Barclays call as of Tuesday’s session.
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