SNDK Climbs 8.66% to $1,420 After Mizuho Raises Target to $1,625 on NAND Tightness

Mizuho's $1,625 Call

The catalyst behind today's tape is concrete. Mizuho's Vijay Rakesh raised his SNDK price target to $1,625 from $1,220 on May 7, keeping the stock at Outperform. The same note re-rated the entire memory complex: Micron lifted to $740 from $545 and Western Digital to $550 from $470, with Rakesh calling memory and storage "critical chokepoints in the AI ramp-up" as agentic AI and inference workloads pull NAND demand past available supply.

This isn't an isolated print, it's the street openly chasing. Bernstein moved to $1,700 on May 4, Susquehanna to $2,000 and Cantor to $1,800 after the Q3 blowout, and Goldman nearly doubled its target from $700 to $1,200 on May 1. When a name with a $1,420 last has Mizuho at $1,625 and a long-tail Motley Fool "$4,000 in a year" take in the same week, the dispersion is doing as much work as any single number.

Why NAND Is The Memory Trade Right Now

The thesis under the upgrades is mechanical, not narrative. NAND flash contract prices rose roughly 60% in Q1 2026, with another 70 to 75% step-up projected for Q2 — pricing power the memory market hasn't seen in years. Sandisk's Q3 FY26 revenue printed at $5.95 billion, up 251% year-over-year, with management pointing to long-dated hyperscaler agreements that lock in volume into 2027.

Memory is one of the few corners of semis where the pricing power is rooted in a real supply-side bottleneck rather than a one-quarter mix shift. That's why the same Mizuho note re-rated Micron and Western Digital alongside it. SNDK just happens to be the smallest, most operationally levered name in that basket, which is also why it moves the most when the basket gets re-rated.

Through The WDC Overhang

Two sessions ago this tape looked very different. SNDK had spent May 6 digesting Western Digital's disclosure of an equity-for-equity exchange of 653,203 SNDK shares for 1.87M WDC shares, with WDC explicitly stating it plans to dispose of the remaining roughly 1.04M SNDK shares through additional swaps, debt-for-equity exchanges, or distributions to its stockholders. That print clipped the tape 7.62% to $1,383 and parked an explicit, undated supply overhang on the float.

Today's move clears the $1,400 line and trades SNDK back above the level the WDC overhang punctured. The forced-seller story didn't go away — WDC is still working off ~7.5M registered shares from the February S-3 — but the Mizuho target sitting $200 above spot gives the bid something concrete to lean on while the distribution mechanic plays out in the background.