Morgan Stanley jacks up its Sandisk price target

Sandisk climbed early Monday after a hefty target price hike from analysts at Morgan Stanley.

Morgan Stanley semiconductor analysts upped their price target from the significantly under market level $273 (the shares are currently hovering around $473) to $483. Morgan Stanley’s big hike might be the start of a trend, as the velocity of the rally in Sandisk has left Wall Street’s average price target of $394 in the dust. The bank kept its “overweight” rating on the stock, which it first applied in March 2025.

Once primarily known as a stodgy maker of USB thumb drives, Sandisk has seen interest explode over the last year alongside prices for NAND memory chips, which its devices rely on. Sandisk was the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 last year, after it was added to the index in November. The shares are up a remarkable 1,255% over the last 12 months, with most of that gain coming since the beginning of September.

NAND chips have long been considered a relatively cheap and ubiquitous commodity in the world of semiconductors. But prices for NAND chips have surged of late because of voracious demand for AI data centers, especially for “enterprise solid state drives” or eSSDs — bulky data storage devices that use more NAND than other storage products and have gobbled up supply of the chips.

Morgan Stanley analysts wrote:

“NAND fundamentals remain exceptional, driven by the surge in enterprise solid state drives that we highlighted a few months ago (with 2 cloud customers ordering close to 10% of global supply for all of 2025 for 4q delivery); that has meaningfully tightened the consumer markets as well.”