SanDisk shares surged as much as 8.9% on Friday, touching an intraday high of $1,693.71 before settling near $1,687 in mid-morning trading. The gain leaves SNDK up roughly 8.5% on the day, with volume running well below its 13.9 million average.

The catalyst emerged late Thursday, when Nvidia confirmed it will acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The open-source AI platform counts more than 18 million users, 3 million models, and over 200,000 companies that rely on it to build and deploy AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted that more than half of Nvidia's sales are "largely driven by open models," and Nvidia is already the largest contributor of open models to Hugging Face. The deal is widely viewed as a move to deepen Nvidia's position in the AI developer ecosystem — a signal that Nvidia sees sustained, long-lived demand for AI compute rather than a short-term cycle, which matters for its memory suppliers.

Where SanDisk Fits In

Nvidia's GPU demand has directly fueled demand for SanDisk's NAND flash memory chips, which are critical components in AI data centers. What benefits Nvidia's AI ambitions tends to support SanDisk's order book. SanDisk, which was spun off from Western Digital in early 2025 as a standalone NAND pure-play, has consequently become one of the market's most direct ways to trade AI-driven flash storage demand.

That connection received additional backing this week from Dell Technologies COO Jeffrey Clarke, who said the supply bottleneck for AI servers comes down to one thing: memory. "The constraints remain the same," Clarke said. "DRAM, DRAM, DRAM, followed by NAND, NAND, NAND."

NAND Fundamentals Back the Move

Beyond the Nvidia news, NAND market fundamentals remain solid. Global NAND revenue jumped roughly 70% quarter-on-quarter in Q2, driven by ongoing AI infrastructure buildouts consuming large volumes of flash storage. Supply remains tight and pricing firm — a dynamic rooted in years of restrained capacity investment across the industry, which left output growth lagging the storage needs of large-scale AI training and inference workloads.

Bernstein analysts maintain a bullish $3,000 price target on SNDK, reflecting confidence in what they describe as a multi-year NAND shortage thesis.

Peer Micron Technology also traded higher on Friday, up around 4%, confirming the move is sector-wide rather than specific to SanDisk.

Macro Relief Adds Fuel

Treasury yields eased heading into Friday's key economic data, giving investors an additional reason to rotate back into high-growth semiconductor names that had been hit hard by rising rates in recent sessions.

The broader market offered little support: the S&P 500 edged down 0.5% and the Nasdaq dipped 0.48%, underscoring that SanDisk's gain is sector-driven.

SNDK remains more than 30% below its 52-week high of $2,354.39. At 23 times earnings and just 8 times forward earnings, the stock is attractively valued relative to its AI memory peers.

On the insider front, SanDisk's Chief Legal Officer Bernard Shek sold 600 stock units at $1,525.60 on September 1 under a pre-scheduled Rule 10b5-1 plan — a routine transaction carrying no directional signal.

Bernstein's $3,000 price target remains in place, with the stock currently trading around $1,687.