SanDisk, a leading NAND flash memory supplier, emphasized its strategic focus on artificial intelligence (AI) workloads during a September 2026 presentation at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia conference. The company highlighted how accelerating AI adoption is reshaping the NAND market, with data center demand now exceeding half of the total addressable market (TAM).
CEO David Goeckeler and CFO Luis Visoso detailed long-term financial projections for fiscal years 2028 through 2030, projecting revenue growth in the mid-to-high teens, gross margins of 80%, and operating margins of 70%. Free cash flow margins are expected to stabilize around 50% over time. In the most recent quarter, SanDisk generated $5 billion in cash, of which $4.5 billion was allocated to share buybacks—representing nearly 90% of free cash flow. The company has committed to returning 100% of free cash flow to shareholders through buybacks, with dividend payouts remaining contingent on future review.
The company’s supply strategy centers on securing long-term agreements with major data center customers, with eight partnerships signed over the past nine months. These contracts cover approximately two-thirds of SanDisk’s fiscal 2028 bit supply, with potential expansion into 2029. Contracts typically span up to five years and include price protections—guaranteeing contracted customers access to gross margins of about 80% while allowing for upside capture through negotiated price ceilings. Third-party financial guarantees further stabilize supply chains. Meanwhile, the remaining one-third of supply remains on the spot market.
SanDisk’s capital efficiency is notably superior, operating at 2.7 times better than industry peers on a per-petabyte basis. Over the past decade, the company has achieved a 27% compounded bit growth rate through advancements in nodal transitions and intellectual property. Current NAND architectures include BiCS8 and BiCS10. A key innovation is its High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) initiative, designed to address the memory wall in AI inference workloads by improving density, bandwidth, and endurance to support larger model context lengths, KV cache, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.
The HBF roadmap is currently in die-taping phase, with customer sampling targeted for 2025 and commercialization planned in subsequent years. Kioxia, a joint venture partner, produces about one-third of the world’s NAND supply, contributing to SanDisk’s broader capacity and innovation pipeline.
SanDisk’s stock closed at $1,633.35 USD on September 14, down 3.50% from the prior day, though pre-market trading saw a sharper decline of 5.13% to $1,549.50 USD.
