SNDK Drops Another 9% as OpenAI's IPO Delay Hits the NAND Trade

The OpenAI IPO Delay Is the Fresh Catalyst

SanDisk fell roughly 7.45% on the June 26 session — the Hyperliquid perp tracking it is down 9.14% over 22 hours to about $2,114 — and the proximate trigger is corporate, not technical. Reporting that OpenAI is leaning toward postponing its IPO to 2027 cuts directly at the bull case: a 2027 listing pushes out the capital OpenAI would deploy, and with it the wave of hyperscaler NAND and HBM procurement that memory bulls have been pricing in. Layer on plain profit-taking — the stock had just run to records on the back of strong Micron earnings the prior session — and you get a sharp reversal. Morgan Stanley is sitting at a $1,750 target, more than 20% below here, calling memory valuations "severely overextended."

A Sector-Wide Memory Reset

This is a sector unwind, not a SanDisk-specific story. It began on June 23 with a 13.64% single-day plunge — SNDK's worst session since spinning off from Western Digital — kicked off by a risk-off rout in South Korea's memory giants, Samsung and SK Hynix. By June 26 the whole complex was bleeding: Micron and Western Digital fell more than 8% and Seagate more than 7%, and a revived short thesis put the cyclicality of NAND pricing back in focus even with supply still tight. The tell is that SNDK — the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 this year — fell hardest, which is what a valuation reset looks like when the highest-beta name leads the move down.

The SK Hynix Overhang

The overhang that doesn't clear with a sentiment bounce is SK Hynix's planned $29 billion Nasdaq ADR debut around July 10 — at the top of its range, the largest ADR offering ever, surpassing Alibaba's $21.8 billion New York listing in 2014. It hands AI-memory funds a US-listed pure-play with roughly 57-60% of the HBM market, a deeper and higher-share way to own the AI memory trade than a NAND-weighted name like SanDisk. Every dollar that rotates into SK Hynix on a US exchange is a dollar not bidding the scarcity premium that powered SNDK's run.

What's in Play

The tension is clean: the business looks strong, the stock looks overextended. Nothing in the June 26 tape says SanDisk's demand picture has deteriorated — this is multiple compression on a name that went vertical, not a guidance cut. The levels to frame it: Morgan Stanley's $1,750 marks where a normalized memory multiple sits in their model, while the July 10 SK Hynix listing is the event that either clears the rotation overhang or confirms it. Until then, this perp trades on memory-sector beta and headline risk far more than on anything SanDisk-specific.