SanDisk, the top-performing stock in the Russell 1000 over the past six months, reports earnings on January 29. The storage and memory manufacturer is forecast to beat analyst expectations, with a StarMine SmartEstimate of $3.48 per share vs. a $3.33 consensus estimate, implying a 4.5% Predicted Surprise for fiscal Q2 2025. The SmartEstimate places a greater weight on the most accurate and timely analysts.
Looking deeper into the SmartEstimate reveals an additional signal. On January 23, a Bold Estimate was triggered – a flag reserved for high-conviction calls from the top-rated analysts. The 5-Star Analyst projects EPS of $3.60 per share, which is 8% above consensus and 12.5% above the midpoint of SanDisk’s Q1 guidance range of $3.00-$3:40.
Shares of SanDisk have surged more than 1,000% in the past six months, lifting its market capitalization to $69 billion. The stock has effectively transitioned into a hyper-growth narrative, driven by improved storage and memory demand as AI-related workloads accelerate.
The rise in share price has underpinned by a dramatic reset in analyst expectations as the FY2027 EPS estimate has increased nearly five-fold over the past six months to $29.35 per share, pushing expected year-over-year earnings growth to 96.9%. This reset can be seen in the Analyst Revision Model, where SanDisk has a score of 81 (1 = bearish, 100 = bullish) and ranks in the top quintile relative to its sector peers in North America.
Given the parabolic nature of growth expectations, the StarMine Intrinsic Value (IV) model is particularly informative. IV improves upon a traditional DDM in two critical ways, where a) IV generates a ‘Smart’ stream of cash flows by utilizing the SmartEstimate as a starting input, and b) adjusts the FY1-FY5 stream of cash flows for optimism bias, which captures the tendency for high-growth forecasts to be extrapolated too far into the future and without sufficient mean reversion.
Under the IV model, SanDisk has a forward five-year ‘Smart’ annualized EPS growth rate (CAGR) of 55.5% and a Price-to-Intrinsic Value ratio of 1.36, where values below 1.0 indicate a company being undervalued. Notably, SanDisk is one of only 10 companies in the Russell 1000 with a ‘Smart’ CAGR above 55.5%, highlighting just how high the bar has been set by sell-side analysts.
CEO David Goeckeler provides important context for these projections and has highlighted a structural inflection point where datacenters are now expected to overtake mobile as the largest NAND end market for the first time in 15 years, as storage and memory becomes increasingly critical to AI workloads. Management also expects investments in datacenters and AI infrastructure to exceed $1 trillion by 2030, materially expanding the total addressable market.
The industry shift has direct implications for SanDisk’s business model. Historically, more than half of revenue is generated by the Client (now called Edge) segment – spanning PC, Mobile, and Automotive end markets, while Cloud (now Datacenter) contributed only 13% of revenue last year. Momentum in the Datacenter segment was already evident last quarter, where revenue reached $269 million, up 26% quarter-over-quarter, supported by rising hyperscaler demand for AI-optimized storage solutions, including the company’s “Stargate” platform. Taken together, these trends suggest Datacenter is positioned to represent a meaningfully larger share of SanDisk’s revenue mix going forward.
Prior Editions of the StarMine Spotlight:
(#004): Magnificent-7 Earnings Preview: Growth Slows, StarMine Signals Declining Sentiment – Jan 27. 2026
(#003): StarMine Flags Credit Rating Divergence Amid Oracle’s AI Push – Dec 9. 2025
#002: StarMine Flags Strong Analyst Sentiment Ahead of Nvidia Earnings – Nov 18. 2025
#001: Meta’s Spending Spree – StarMine Signals $105 Billion CapEx by 2026 – Nov 5. 2025
