Remember Ferdinand de Lesseps? The guy who built the Suez Canal in 1859? Everyone called it the most expensive ditch in history. They weren’t wrong—it cost $100 million in 1869 dollars and nearly bankrupted the French company that built it. But here’s the thing: once it was done, every ship crossing between Europe and Asia had exactly two choices: use the canal or take the long way around. The infrastructure created permanent, captive demand, and the companies running the show collected tolls for a century.
Fast forward to 2026, and we’re watching the same movie play out with AI infrastructure. Except this time, the “ditch” is memory chips and data centers, and the toll collectors are companies like SanDisk (SNDK) and Nebius (NBIS).
The bears keep calling the top. They called it in October 2025. Then February. Then March. Then April. Each time, they watched the stock pull back 25% or more, only to rip to new highs. Their thesis? “Memory is cyclical, and cycles end.” Sounds reasonable until you look at the actual numbers.
Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google have committed to roughly $725 billion in AI infrastructure spending for 2026 alone. That’s not a typo. That’s a once-in-a-generation buildout, and a massive chunk of every infrastructure dollar lands in the memory complex. That money has to go somewhere, and it’s going straight into SanDisk’s fabs and Nebius’s data centers.
SanDisk: The Shovel Seller
SanDisk’s stock has run from $50 to roughly $1,400. That’s insane. But here’s what’s wild: its forward P/E ratio sits near nine. Nine! The earnings are doing all the heavy lifting—multiples haven’t expanded at all. As long as that holds, SNDK has room to run. The market keeps trying to call the top, and the market keeps being wrong.
Nebius: The Neocloud Nobody’s Talking About
If SanDisk is the shovel, Nebius is the rented mule. Spun out of old Yandex assets after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Nebius rebuilt itself as a “neocloud”—basically a high-beta, levered play on the same hyperscaler capex wave.
The numbers are almost cartoonish. Revenue is on pace to grow more than 500% this year, with margins climbing from 40% to 59% by 2028. Yet the stock trades around 16 times forward EBITDA. Sixteen! That’s absurdly cheap for a company growing like that.
Technically, the chart just executed a textbook V-shaped recovery off its prior all-time high near $135, turning what was resistance into the new floor.
The Pattern Nobody’s Learning
Both names share a brutal pattern: violent, gut-wrenching pullbacks followed by face-ripping rallies. Anyone who chased these stocks at the top got destroyed. Anyone who treated the dips as opportunities did very well.
The bears calling tops on AI infrastructure are making the same mistake as the Suez Canal skeptics. They’re watching the stock price instead of the $725 billion in committed capex. Capital has to land somewhere. And that somewhere is increasingly SNDK and NBIS.
The infrastructure is being built. The demand is permanent. The tolls are being collected. Stop fighting it.
