SNDK Stock Dips After-Hours As Sandisk's Q1 FY27 Outlook Misses Expectations Despite Memory-Driven Q4 Profit

• Sandisk posted fourth-quarter revenue of $8.97 billion, up from $1.9 billion a year earlier.
• A structural deficit in NAND flash memory capacity and hyperscaler demand for high-capacity enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs) gave Sandisk immense pricing power.
• For Q1 FY27, Sandisk forecasts revenue between $10.3 billion and $10.8 billion, lower than the higher-end analyst expectations of $9.4 billion to $12.3 billion.

Sandisk Corp. (SNDK) slipped after-hours on Wednesday after its Q1 FY27 revenue outlook fell short of expectations, while delivering blockbuster fiscal fourth-quarter results.

The memory chipmaker reported fourth-quarter revenue of $8.97 billion, a nearly fivefold jump from $1.9 billion in the same period last year, powered by an unprecedented wave of spending from cloud hyperscalers like Meta (META), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) racing to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Net income reached $6.9 billion, or $43.97 per share, reversing a net loss of $23 million, or 16 cents per share, in the prior-year quarter. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $39.25, comfortably beating Wall Street consensus estimates of $34.96 per share on revenue of $8.48 billion.

The dramatic turnaround highlights how high-performance enterprise storage has rapidly transformed from a commodity market into a critical bottleneck for training and deploying complex large language models and generative AI systems.

Hyperscaler Appetite Meets Constrained Supply

As tech giants and cloud providers scale up mega-data centers to support AI tools, demand for high-density Enterprise Solid-State Drives (eSSDs) has far outpaced global supply. Industry-wide capacity constraints in NAND flash memory manufacturing have created a structural deficit, leaving hyperscalers vying for limited inventory and pushing average selling prices dramatically higher.

Capacity shortages across enterprise flash memory continue to bolster memory producers' bottom lines. To secure supply, major cloud customers have increasingly locked in multi-year Long-Term Agreements (LTAs) with fixed and variable pricing mechanisms to guarantee storage allocation for training clusters.

"These long-term agreements are tailored to meet the needs of our customers and provide us with demand certainty at financials consistent with our outlook... allow[ing] us to capture upside as capacity remains constrained across AI data center deployments," Sandisk management said during its earnings call. 

 Q1 FY27 Outlook and Forward-Looking Statements

Looking ahead to the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Sandisk projected continued strong momentum as AI data center expansions show no signs of abating.

The company guided Q1 FY27 revenue to land between $10.3 billion and $10.8 billion, compared to $9.4 billion to $12.3 billion expected by analysts polled by Fiscal.ai. Adjusted earnings per share are forecasted to range from $44.00 to $46.00 per share. By comparison, Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet were expecting first-quarter adjusted earnings of $44.2 per share.

SNDK Stock: Retail View 

Retail sentiment on Stocktwits was ‘extremely bullish’ with ‘high’ message volumes. 

A user was bullish on memory demand and the AI thesis sticking and mentioned a 5% after-market drop was common for a high-beta stock like SNDK. 

SNDK stock has soared 460% year-to-date. Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) has surged 99% during the same period. 

For updates and corrections, email newsroom[at]stocktwits[dot]com.