Storage Shares Rally. SanDisk up over 4%; Western Digital, Micron up Nearly 2%; Seagate Tech, DRAM up Around 1%

Storage shares rallied in premarket trading. SanDisk up over 4%; Western Digital, Micron up nearly 2%; Seagate Tech, DRAM up around 1%.

Sandisk on Thursday said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-teens percentage rate from fiscal years 2028 to 2030, encouraged by strong ​demand amid rapid AI infrastructure buildout.

The company said the projection ‌is in line with growth in the amount of storage capacity it produces, a metric the industry calls "bit growth."

Speaking ​at Sandisk's Investor Day, finance chief Luis Visoso said the company expects adjusted ​gross margins to remain at around 80% over the same period.

By laying out a multi-year framework tied to committed customer volumes, Sandisk is seeking to show that its recent ​growth can be sustained, rather than reflecting a temporary demand spike.

Under its ​new business model, Sandisk has signed agreements with eight customers, which include three U.S. ‌hyperscalers, ⁠covering about half of its storage output in fiscal 2027 and two-thirds in fiscal 2028.

Chief Technology Officer Alper Ilkbahar said Sandisk has taped out its first memory die — or the individual silicon chip that stores data — for its ​High Bandwidth Flash ​technology, and is ⁠working to deliver initial samples to customers developing AI inference devices next year.

HBF is a memory chip that combines ​the speed of high-bandwidth memory used with AI processors ​and the ⁠capacity of flash memory, helping data centers meet the growing memory demands of AI inference — the data crunching that occurs when a user queries a chatbot.

The ⁠outlook ​builds on Sandisk's financial results reported last week, ​when it also forecast first-quarter revenue above analyst estimates, citing rising demand for memory chips used ​in AI data centers.

Goldman Sachs, in a research note dated August 13, highlighted that SanDisk Corp. not only provided long-term financial guidance that significantly exceeded market expectations (80% gross margin, 75% operating margin) but also made a bold commitment to return 100% of excess free cash flow to shareholders. Furthermore, the company's next-generation HBF (High Bandwidth Flash) technology roadmap for AI inference provides substantial upside potential.