SanDisk Revenue Nearly Quintupled to a Record $11 Billion Last Quarter as AI Inference Reshapes NAND — and It Announces an 8-for-1 Split

NAND flash maker SanDisk reported first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $11.03 billion on Thursday, a 378% jump from $2.31 billion a year earlier and 23% above the prior quarter, beating the $10.68 billion consensus. GAAP net income reached $8.1 billion, or $52.60 per diluted share, while non-GAAP earnings of $49.51 per share cleared the $46.27 analysts expected. Non-GAAP gross margin landed at 85.1%, against 29.8% a year ago, and the company generated $5.7 billion in adjusted free cash flow.

Management said roughly 60% of the quarter's sequential revenue growth came from higher unit shipments and about 40% from higher prices, the mirror image of what a memory company reports in a normal year. The company attributed the structural shift to AI inference: key-value caches for large context windows, multimodal inputs and persistent user memory are turning high-capacity, low-power flash into core data center infrastructure rather than a consumer commodity.

The data center segment was the engine. Its revenue reached $4.80 billion, up 61% sequentially and roughly 1,682% year over year, now about 43.5% of total revenue. The edge business, spanning phones, PCs and automotive, grew 7% sequentially to $5.83 billion, while the consumer segment was the only decliner at $397 million, down 29% from the prior quarter, which the company said reflects consumers adjusting to sharply higher prices.

Forward visibility is unusually thick for a commodity memory business. SanDisk said it has signed eight customers across data center and edge with minimum contracted NAND business model revenue of $93.9 billion, that about half of its fiscal 2027 supply and roughly two-thirds of fiscal 2028 supply are already committed, and that 95% of its long-term agreements are with investment-grade companies that generate about $130 billion in combined operating cash flow. Customer interest, it added, now extends beyond fiscal 2030.

For the second quarter the company guided revenue of $12.2 billion to $12.6 billion, above the roughly $12.1 billion consensus, with non-GAAP gross margin of 84.5% to 85.5%. Its market model projects data center demand will exceed 55% of the NAND market in calendar 2027, with data center bit demand up about 40% on top of a doubling in 2026, and key-value cache expected to make up about a third of AI data center flash consumption by the end of 2030. Those figures are company projections, not independent estimates.

The board also approved an 8-for-1 stock split, with new shares distributed on November 19 and split-adjusted trading beginning November 20. The stock is up more than 450% this year, though it slipped about 4% after hours despite the beat — a reminder that at these valuations the market is now pricing memory makers like AI infrastructure companies, and reacts to the growth curve rather than the record prints.