By Piero Cingari
Publication Date: 2026-05-11 22:31:00
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The chart below looks like AI-generated, but it’s not.
Since its February 2025 spin-off from Western Digital Corp., SanDisk Corp. has gained 4,086%. Nvidia Corp., the AI poster child of the decade, has gained 4,006% — over nearly nine years.
SanDisk did in 15 months what Nvidia took nearly a decade to deliver.
The reflex on Wall Street has been to call it a meme.
It isn’t.
Behind the parabola sits the most violent supply-demand mismatch the memory industry has seen since 2017, what Wall Street analysts now call the AI memory supercycle.
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The Three Memories That Run AI
Every AI server runs on three different kinds of memory chip, made by largely the same handful of companies.
DRAM is the working memory. It is what holds the data your computer is actively using — and what holds the parameters of an AI model while it runs. It is fast, but it forgets everything when the power is cut.
NAND flash is the storage memory. It is what’s inside an SSD or a USB stick. It is slower than DRAM, but it keeps data forever and costs a fraction per gigabyte. AI training datasets, model checkpoints, and retrieval databases all live on NAND.
HBM, or high-bandwidth memory, is a special kind of DRAM. Engineers stack 8, 12, or 16 DRAM chips on top…
