Article · AI translation
Thanks to IT Home reader 刺客 for the tip!
IT Home reported on October 30 that, during its earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal 2027 (July 4, 2026, to October 2, 2026), SanDisk executives said AI inference is reshaping supply and demand in the NAND flash market and that customers have “underestimated their NAND flash capacity needs.”
SanDisk management said customers generally “underestimated the NAND capacity needed to run AI infrastructure” and are therefore placing substantial additional long-term orders. The company’s new business model (NBM) order pipeline now extends to 2030 and beyond.
IT Home note: NBM is a long-term partnership model based on purchase volume commitments, contractual obligations, and pricing mechanisms. SanDisk disclosed that about 50% of its fiscal 2027 bit shipments (NAND shipments measured by storage capacity) are already covered by NBM agreements. That share is expected to rise to about two-thirds in fiscal 2028; by the end of this decade, NBM demand in the pipeline could exceed the company’s available supply.
On the technology front, SanDisk announced that its first high-bandwidth flash (HBF) memory die has been taped out and entered manufacturing. Designed for AI inference, HBF aims to deliver read bandwidth close to HBM’s while offering NAND-scale capacity, supporting larger models, longer contexts, and growing KV caches. The first product samples are scheduled for delivery in the next calendar year.
SanDisk also noted that the market is exploring the use of SLC NAND to replace some costly DRAM. In AI inference, flash can serve as a capacity tier, helping systems retain broader context and reduce expensive repeated computation.
After the earnings release, SanDisk (SNDK) shares showed a clear “buy the rumor, sell the news” pattern, rising initially before falling: although both Q1 results and guidance for the next quarter exceeded expectations, the stock still declined in after-hours trading.
In regular trading on October 29, SanDisk closed at $1,330.05 (about 8,881 yuan at current exchange rates), down $74.72 (about 498.9 yuan at current exchange rates), or 5.32%, for the day. It had closed at $1,404.77 (about 9,379 yuan at current exchange rates) on the previous trading day.
The earnings report was released after the US stock market closed. Quarterly revenue was $11.03 billion (about 73.646 billion yuan at current exchange rates), and non-GAAP earnings per share were $49.51 (about 330.6 yuan at current exchange rates), both above market expectations. The company also announced an 8-for-1 stock split, effective November 19.
SanDisk shares rose briefly after the earnings report was released but then fell back. As of the evening of October 29 Eastern Time, the after-hours price was about $1,282.50 to $1,295.05 (about 8,563 to 8,647 yuan at current exchange rates), down a further approximately 2.6% to 3.6% from that day’s close. Compared with the previous day’s closing price of $1,404.77 (about 9,379 yuan at current exchange rates), the cumulative decline was about 7.8%.