Just caught something interesting in the storage chip space that's worth paying attention to. Bernstein just threw a pretty aggressive bullish call on SanDisk, slapping a $1,000 price target on it—that's a 72% jump from their previous $580 target. Currently trading around $665, so there's still meaningful upside on the table.

What caught my eye is the valuation gap here. Micron's trading at 11.6x sales while SanDisk is sitting at just 3.2x despite both benefiting from the same NAND flash recovery narrative. That's a pretty wide spread, and timing-wise, it matters. The market's been rotating after the recent precious metals pullback, and SanDisk's latest results actually give investors a compelling reason to look at this name.

Their latest quarter was genuinely impressive. Revenue hit $3.03 billion—up 61% year-over-year and 31% quarter-over-quarter. But here's what really stood out: non-GAAP EPS came in at $6.20 versus market expectations of $3.33. Their gross margin surged to 51.1%, which is massive compared to Micron's 45%. Data center revenue alone jumped 64% quarter-over-quarter to $440 million, driven by AI infrastructure clients ramping up storage deployments alongside their compute builds.

The bigger picture is that NAND flash pricing, which got absolutely hammered in 2023-2024, has finally turned the corner. Industry data showed contract prices dropped 3-8% in Q4 2024, but then jumped 5-10% in both Q3 and Q4 of 2025. Looking ahead to Q1 2026, forecasts are pointing to a 55-60% quarter-over-quarter price increase—that's a pretty dramatic reversal.

What makes SanDisk different from other chip players is that it's a pure NAND flash play now. After spinning off from Western Digital, they're not tangled up in the HBM arms race or dealing with the execution risk of competing for AI-specific capital spending. They're just focused on NAND—consumer SSDs, enterprise storage, embedded flash, the whole ecosystem. So when NAND prices recover, they capture that upside directly without noise from other segments.

CEO David Goeckeler actually signaled something important: they're moving away from quarterly pricing negotiations and shifting customers toward multi-year supply agreements with locked-in pricing. That's a structural shift that could provide more predictability and pricing power.

Newman's raised his 2026 and 2027 EPS forecasts to $38.92 and $90.96 respectively—188% above consensus. The company's also guiding for Q3 revenue of $4.4-4.8 billion with gross margins potentially reaching 65-67%. That's the kind of operating leverage you see when pricing finally recovers in a cyclical industry.

The core thesis is pretty straightforward: SanDisk is the cleanest play on NAND flash recovery. No HBM distractions, no DRAM exposure, just pure upside from improving chip prices and strong demand from data center buildouts. Institutions are clearly taking notice given how far this has already moved, but if the NAND recovery thesis plays out as expected, there could still be room to run.