Sandisk Has Had a Scorching Rally This Year. JPMorgan Thinks It Can Go Much Higher.

Sandisk shares have already surged more than 500% in 2026, but JPMorgan believes the flash memory company still has significantly more room to run as artificial intelligence fuels soaring demand for data storage.

The investment bank upgraded Sandisk (SNDK) to overweight from neutral on Friday and set a $2,250 price target on the stock. That target represents about 47% upside from Thursday's closing price, according to CNBC.

Sandisk shares have climbed 544% since the beginning of the year, a remarkable rally driven by accelerating AI adoption and increasingly tight supplies of memory and storage products. JPMorgan analyst Harlan Sur said the company is particularly well positioned to benefit from what the bank sees as a long-term shift in NAND flash demand.

"Following a period of restriction on Sandisk (SNDK), we are moving to an OW Rating," Sur wrote in a note to clients Friday seen by CNBC. The analyst pointed specifically to AI inference, the process in which trained AI models use new data to generate answers, predictions and other outputs.

As companies deploy AI applications on a larger scale, the infrastructure supporting those systems requires enormous amounts of storage and memory. "SNDK is in many respects uniquely positioned to capture the ongoing structural inflection in NAND demand driven by rapid growth in AI inference," Sur said.

The upgrade comes one day after Sandisk held an Investor Day in New York, where the company outlined how it plans to capitalize on the surge in memory demand. A central part of that strategy is a new business model built around structured pricing mechanisms and pre-payment agreements with major customers.

JPMorgan believes those arrangements could make Sandisk's financial performance more predictable and reduce the cyclicality that has historically characterized the memory industry.

Memory manufacturers have traditionally been exposed to sharp swings in supply and demand. Periods of shortages can push prices and profits sharply higher, while oversupply can quickly pressure prices and margins. Sandisk's new framework could provide greater visibility by locking in longer-term commitments with customers.

According to Sur, Sandisk has already signed eight of these new business model agreements, also described as long-term agreements, representing approximately $94 billion in total contract value at floor pricing. "The New Business Model (NBM) framework (or LTAs - long-term agreements) has structurally reset SNDK's margin profile higher and materially reduced cyclicality," Sur wrote.

The contracts have a weighted-average duration of more than four years, according to JPMorgan, potentially giving Sandisk greater protection from the industry's traditional boom-and-bust cycles while demand for AI infrastructure continues expanding.

JPMorgan's bullish call is also consistent with the broader view on Wall Street. Of the 25 analysts covering Sandisk, 22 currently rate the stock a buy or strong buy, while the remaining three have hold ratings, according to LSEG data cited by CNBC. None of the analysts included in the data have a sell rating.