SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) enters its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report — due Tuesday, August 5, after the market close — as one of 2026’s most dramatic reversal stories. The memory and storage company’s stock had surged roughly 439% year-to-date at its peak, riding the AI memory supercycle as demand for high-bandwidth memory chips hit unprecedented levels. Then came the crash: SNDK has plunged more than 50% from its 2026 high, touching the critical $1,000 support level in recent days, before staging a modest recovery heading into earnings. The question now confronting investors is whether the selloff is overdone — or whether tomorrow’s report will reveal that the AI memory boom is more fragile than the bulls assumed.
The earnings bar is enormous. Wall Street consensus estimates call for EPS of approximately $33.38 to $34.24 per share for the quarter ended June 2026 — an astronomical increase from just $0.29 per share in the same period a year ago. That explosive growth reflects the pricing power that emerged as AI training and inference workloads created a shortage of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized chips used in Nvidia’s GPUs and competing AI accelerators. But the bear case is also concrete: China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) made a splashy public debut in recent weeks, rattling investors who fear that a flood of Chinese memory supply could compress margins. SNDK stock shed 35% in just three days following the CXMT IPO, and analysts at ad-hoc-news and TradingKey note that despite analyst price targets implying as much as 84% upside from current levels, the overhang of potential supply competition is real.
For retail investors, the setup is unusually binary. If SanDisk beats and management reaffirms that demand for HBM remains supply-constrained — with AI customers like Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft still not getting all the chips they want — the stock could stage a sharp recovery from deeply oversold levels. If guidance disappoints or hints that Chinese competition is already impacting pricing, the selloff could extend further. Given that SNDK already tests the $1,000 support zone and is attempting a reversal, traders with conviction on the AI memory thesis may see value here. But the China supply risk is not hypothetical — and with a stock that has already moved 439% in one direction this year, sizing and risk management matter more than ever going into this print.
