Sandisk's fiscal 2026 revenue rose 175% to $20.2 billion and net income reached $11.4 billion, driven far more by AI-fuelled NAND price increases than by volume, with Q1 FY2027 guided to $10.3–$10.8 billion.
Revenue
$20.2B
+175.3% YoY
Net income
$11.4B
Diluted EPS
$73.76
Operating margin
61.2%
Headline: revenue nearly tripled to $20.2 billion as AI demand pushed NAND prices sharply higher
Sandisk's fiscal year 2026 (the 53 weeks ended July 3, 2026) was a full swing from loss to large profit. Revenue rose 175% to $20,248 million from $7,355 million, gross margin jumped from 30.1% to 71.5%, and the company earned $11,433 million of net income ($73.76 per diluted share) after a $1,641 million loss the year before.
Sandisk makes NAND flash — the memory chips that keep data when the power is off, used in solid-state drives (SSDs), phones, PCs, memory cards and USB sticks. NAND behaves a lot like a commodity: when demand outruns supply, prices per gigabyte jump and almost all of the extra revenue drops straight to profit, because the factories cost roughly the same to run either way. That is exactly what happened this year. The 10-K says total products sold rose only by a mid-teens percent on an exabyte basis (an exabyte is a billion gigabytes — this is the industry's measure of "bit shipments", i.e. how much storage capacity was sold), while revenue rose 175%. In other words, most of the growth came from price, not volume.
Management's own explanation in the annual report: "the rapid growth of AI infrastructure is driving demand for high-performance storage products... The current demand environment has led to pricing shifts that have positively impacted our business."
Takeaway: Sandisk sold only about 15% more storage capacity than last year but collected 175% more revenue for it — this was a pricing year, not a volume year. That makes the results spectacular but also highly exposed to the NAND price cycle; the company's answer is to lock customers into multi-year volume contracts before the cycle turns.
Key figures
Metric
FY2026 (53 weeks to Jul 3, 2026)
FY2025 (52 weeks to Jun 27, 2025)
Change
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n/m = not meaningful, because the prior year was a loss. Operating margin is operating income divided by revenue. Non-GAAP figures are from the August 5, 2026 earnings release and exclude items such as stock-based compensation.
Two comparison caveats. First, fiscal 2026 had 53 weeks versus 52 (the extra week fell in the first quarter), which modestly flatters the year-over-year growth. Second, Sandisk was spun off from Western Digital on February 21, 2025, so the first ~8 months of fiscal 2025 are "carve-out" figures that include cost allocations from Western Digital rather than Sandisk's own standalone costs; the filing cautions they "may not reflect" what a standalone company would have reported. Fiscal 2025's loss was also driven by a one-off $1,830 million goodwill impairment (a write-down of the accounting value of past acquisitions) — excluding it, fiscal 2025 operating income would still have been positive, at $453 million. None of this changes the direction of the story, but it means percentage changes on profit lines aren't meaningful.
Where the growth came from: price, by end market
Sandisk sells into three end markets (renamed this year: "Datacenter" was formerly "Cloud", "Edge" was formerly "Client").
End market
FY2026
FY2025
Change
Exabytes sold
Revenue per GB
Datacenter
$5,153M
$960M
+437%
up almost 120%
up almost 150%
Edge (PCs, phones, auto, gaming)
$12,160M
$4,127M
+195%
up high single digits %
up almost 180%
Consumer (retail cards, USB, drives)
$2,935M
$2,268M
+29%
down mid-teens %
up low-fifties %
Total
$20,248M
$7,355M
+175%
up mid-teens %
—
Datacenter is the only segment where volume and price both surged: capacity shipped more than doubled and price per gigabyte rose ~2.5x. This is the enterprise SSD business selling into AI data centers, and it went from 13% of revenue to 25%.
Edge was the biggest dollar contributor (+$8,033 million), and it was almost entirely price — capacity sold rose only high single digits while revenue per gigabyte nearly tripled.
Consumer actually sold less storage (down mid-teens percent) but still grew revenue 29% on higher prices. That volume decline is consistent with Sandisk steering scarce supply toward higher-paying datacenter and OEM customers.
A related sign of the tight market: sales incentives and price-protection programs (discounts recorded as reductions of revenue) fell to 11% of gross revenue from 19% — Sandisk no longer needed to discount to move product.
My rough cross-check, not a company figure: revenue up 175% on bits up ~15% implies blended revenue per gigabyte up roughly 2.4x, in line with the segment disclosures above.
The fourth quarter shows the momentum still building
The fiscal Q4 figures (from the August 5, 2026 earnings release) show the upcycle accelerated into year-end:
Metric
Q4 FY2026
Q3 FY2026
Q4 FY2025
Revenue
$8,965M
$5,950M
$1,901M
Gross margin
84.6%
78.4%
26.2%
Operating income
$7,037M
$4,111M
$18M
Net income (loss)
$6,903M
$3,615M
$(23)M
Diluted EPS
$43.97
$23.03
$(0.16)
Q4 revenue alone was larger than all of fiscal 2025, and up 51% from Q3; the company said that sequential jump came "approximately one-third from higher volumes and two-thirds from higher pricing." Datacenter revenue doubled quarter-on-quarter to $2,977 million, while Consumer fell 32% to $556 million. An 84.6% gross margin is extraordinary for a hardware maker and reflects just how far prices have run ahead of production costs.
Below the operating line: a one-off investment gain helped
Pre-tax income ($13,017 million) was higher than operating income thanks to an $807 million gain on Sandisk's stake in Nanya Technology (a DRAM maker it invested in during March 2026), partly offset by a $118 million increase in other expenses "primarily due to the settlement of certain non-operating legal matters." The Nanya gain is a mark-to-market move in a share price, not recurring operating profit — it's the main reason GAAP net income ($11,433 million) sits above the non-GAAP figure ($10,987 million). The effective tax rate was a low 12%, helped by Malaysian tax holidays that expire between 2028 and 2031; the company also expects to become subject to the 15% US corporate alternative minimum tax in fiscal 2027.
Operating expenses rose modestly: R&D up $196 million to $1,328 million and SG&A up $103 million to $676 million, mostly higher performance-linked pay. Because revenue rose so much faster, opex fell from about 24% of revenue (excluding the impairment) to about 10%.
Cash: debt repaid, $4.5 billion of buybacks
Operating cash flow was $11,671 million versus $84 million a year earlier. Sandisk used it to:
repay the full $2.0 billion Term Loan B it took on at the spin-off (settled early on March 4, 2026, with a $46 million write-off of issuance costs), leaving no debt drawn;
buy back $4.5 billion of its own shares;
spend $970 million on marketable equity securities (the Nanya stake).
Year-end cash was $4,762 million. The board authorized a further $14 billion buyback in August 2026, taking remaining authorization to $15.5 billion. Capital spending was only $177 million — tiny relative to revenue, because most wafer production sits in the Flash Ventures joint venture with Kioxia, where Sandisk buys wafers at cost plus a small markup.
One number to watch: days of inventory rose to 178 from 135, which the company attributes to "inventory builds to meet demand." In a rising-price market holding more inventory is profitable; if prices turn, it becomes a write-down risk.
Outlook
Management guidance for Q1 fiscal 2027 (quarter ending around October 2026):
Revenue $10.3–$10.8 billion — the midpoint of $10.55 billion is about 18% above Q4's $8,965 million.
GAAP gross margin 83.0%–84.9%, roughly flat with Q4's 84.6%.
Non-GAAP diluted EPS $44.00–$46.00 on ~155 million shares.
In the 10-K, management says it expects "AI-driven demand to persist through calendar year 2027 and beyond," and that capital spending will increase in fiscal 2027 "as we transition to newer nodes."
The bigger strategic change is the New Business Model (NBM) contracts: multi-year agreements with Datacenter and Edge customers that commit them to buy set volumes, with fixed-plus-variable pricing and financial guarantees. The company says NBMs "are expected to become our predominant way of doing business" and should "reduce certain elements of industry cyclicality." It had signed ten such agreements by the August release.
My read. The guide implies another quarter of both higher revenue and near-record margins, so the upcycle hasn't peaked in Sandisk's own numbers yet. But results this price-driven cut both ways: NAND's history is that high margins pull in new capacity across the industry, and the 10-K's own risk factors note that periods of excess capacity have led to "significant reductions in average selling prices." Three things will show which way this goes: (1) whether volume growth starts to carry more of the revenue growth (Q4 was already one-third volume), (2) how much of revenue moves under NBM contracts, which would cushion a price decline, and (3) whether the swelling inventory and fiscal 2027's higher capex signal supply catching up with demand. Fiscal 2027 also faces a tougher tax picture (CAMT) and, for now, uncertain US tariff exposure under ongoing Section 232/301 investigations, though the company says most of its US-sold products are currently exempt.