Forget the Chips, Buy Memory: Why AI Money Is Moving to Storage

While the stock market has spent the last two years obsessed with logic chips and GPUs, a significant shift is occurring in the hardware sector. The compute trade, which represents betting on the processors that allow AI models to think, is taking a breather. In its place, smart money is rotating aggressively into the hardware required to store the data.

This shift was on full display during the first month of 2026. SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) surged around 90% on heavy volume, hitting an all-time high of roughly $459. Its former parent company, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC), rose about 23% during the same period, continuing a massive rally that has seen the stock price more than double over the last 12 months.

The catalyst for this move is a realization among institutional investors: AI is not just about processing speed. It is about data capacity. As AI models grow larger, the bottleneck has moved from the processor to the storage drives. The infrastructure build-out has entered a new phase, creating distinct opportunities for the two most prominent names in American memory.

Supply Shock: The Zero-Sum Game

To understand why stock prices for SanDisk and Western Digital are rising, investors must examine their supply chains. Semiconductor manufacturing is a zero-sum game. A factory, or fab, has a limited number of silicon wafers it can process in a month. These wafers are the raw canvases upon which chips are printed.

Currently, major global manufacturers are under immense pressure to produce High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). This is the specialized, stacked memory used directly on NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPUs to facilitate rapid calculations. To meet this insatiable demand, manufacturers have converted their production lines, dedicating almost all their capacity to HBM.

This reallocation has created a massive supply void for standard NAND Flash and DRAM. There simply are not enough wafers left to produce standard storage chips.

• The Supply Shock: With fewer machines making standard memory, the global supply has plummeted.
• The Demand Spike: Simultaneously, data centers are consuming over 70% of the world's high-end memory production.
• The Result: A classic economic squeeze. With supply down and demand up, manufacturers have regained pricing power, allowing them to raise prices significantly without dampening demand.

SanDisk: The Hot Tier Speed Demon

SanDisk, now fully independent following its spin-off from Western Digital in early 2025, is the primary beneficiary of the need for speed. In the data center, SanDisk provides the hot tier of storage, fast, solid-state drives (SSDs) used when data needs to be accessed instantly.

The bullish case for SanDisk relies on a specific technical requirement of AI training called checkpointing.

When an AI model is learning, it needs to save its progress constantly, often every few minutes, in case of a power failure or system crash.

If a model crashes without saving, weeks of work and millions of dollars in electricity could be lost. This process requires massive amounts of ultra-fast storage to write data instantly. SanDisk’s Enterprise SSDs are the industry standard for this task.

Financial data reflects this surging demand, specifically regarding operating leverage. Because SanDisk has high fixed costs to run its factories, once those costs are covered, every extra dollar of price increase drops straight to the bottom line. This is why earnings are growing faster than revenue.

• Revenue Growth: Fiscal 2026 revenue is projected to reach $10.45 billion, a 42% year-over-year increase.
• Earnings Explosion: The shortage has allowed for solid margin expansion. Earnings per share (EPS) estimates have jumped from approximately $2.99 in 2025 to a projected $13.46 for 2026.

Operational clarity has also improved. The company has streamlined its identity, rebranding its consumer products under the SanDisk Optimus line. This unification signals to investors that the company is no longer a confused mix of businesses, but a focused, pure-play flash memory provider.

Western Digital: The Cold Tier Vault

If SanDisk is the sprinter, Western Digital is the marathon runner. As a pure-play hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturer, Western Digital provides cold-tier storage.

AI models are trained on datasets that are unimaginably large, petabytes of video, text, and images. Storing this training data on fast SSDs is too expensive. Instead, companies store this information in data lakes using cost-effective HDDs.

Western Digital effectively owns the infrastructure for these massive digital reservoirs.

Western Digital’s analyst community has taken note of this duopoly power Western Digital shares with competitor Seagate (NASDAQ: STX):

• Citigroup raised its target to $280 on Jan. 20, 2026, an increase of over 25%. 
• Rosenblatt Securities raised its price target 21% to $270 the same day.
• Bank of America has pushed its target up 13% to $257.

For investors seeking stability rather than aggressive growth, Western Digital offers a compelling income component. The Board of Directors recently approved a 25% increase to the quarterly dividend, raising it to 12.5 cents per share.

Looking forward, the company is securing its technical lead with HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology. Traditional hard drives have hit a physical limit; the magnetic bits are so small they become unstable. HAMR uses a tiny laser to heat the disk surface for a fraction of a second, allowing data to be written more tightly than ever before. This innovation enables drives exceeding 40 terabytes, ensuring WDC remains relevant as data generation continues to grow.

The Memory Supercycle Is Just Beginning

The AI Trade is not over; it has simply moved downstream. The constraints on silicon wafers are expected to persist throughout 2026, suggesting that the current pricing power for memory manufacturers is not a short-term blip, but a structural shift.

Investors are presented with two distinct paths. SanDisk offers high-beta exposure to aggressive growth and rising earnings estimates, driven by immediate AI processing and checkpointing requirements. Western Digital offers a more stable, income-generating path, supported by the exponential growth of data archiving and unique HAMR technology.

As the shortage of memory chips tightens its grip on the global electronics market, the floor for these stocks remains high. In 2026, storage is indeed becoming the new compute.

Where Should You Invest $1,000 Right Now?

Before you make your next trade, you'll want to hear this.

MarketBeat keeps track of Wall Street's top-rated and best performing research analysts and the stocks they recommend to their clients on a daily basis.

Our team has identified the five stocks that top analysts are quietly whispering to their clients to buy now before the broader market catches on... and none of the big name stocks were on the list.

They believe these five stocks are the five best companies for investors to buy now...

See The Five Stocks Here

The article "Forget the Chips, Buy Memory: Why AI Money Is Moving to Storage" first appeared on MarketBeat.