These Growth Stocks Surged 300% and 1,400% While Everyone Was Watching Nvidia, and They Are Still Cheap. Here’s Why. | The Motley Fool

While Nvidia remains the poster child for the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure buildout, it has been far from the best-performing stock in the space over the past year. While Nvidia’s stock is up a strong 60% over this period, Micron Technology (MU +7.52%) has a 300% gain, and Sandisk (SNDK +9.81%) is up nearly 1,400%.

Micron and Sandisk are both riding strong trends in the memory market, although they are involved in different aspects of it. What’s even crazier is that even after these huge gains, both Micron and Sandisk still trade at modest forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios. Micron trades at a forward P/E of 3.7 times fiscal 2027 (ending August 2027) analysts’ earnings estimates, while Sandisk trades at an 8 times multiple for its fiscal 2027 ending in June 2027.

While both are seeing huge growth and have what appear to be attractive valuations, whether the stocks are good buys at current levels is a bit more complicated. Let’s dive in and see how they got here and what’s next.

Riding the memory wave

The memory market is broken down into two distinct parts. DRAM (dynamic random access memory) is the memory that translates into computing speed. It’s extremely fast but volatile, which means that once power is lost, so is all the data. NAND, or flash memory, is significantly slower than DRAM but is nonvolatile, able to store data over long periods of time.

DRAM is more complex and difficult to manufacture, and as such, three…