Sandisk shares fell as much as 5.8% on Thursday even after Mizuho raised its price target to $2,050. Investors are weighing mixed economic data and reported pauses in OpenAI's model training against a stock that had surged more than 1,100% over the prior year.
Sandisk shares fell between 4.9% and 5.8% on Thursday, October 8, 2026, closing around $1,609. The drop came on the same day Mizuho raised its price target on the stock.
A sell-off despite an analyst upgrade
Mizuho kept its Outperform rating on Sandisk (ticker: SNDK) and raised its price target from $1,875 to $2,050, well above where the stock closed. Yet shares still slid, touching a session low near $1,584 on heavy trading. Volume reached approximately 7 to 9 million shares.
The sell-off was not confined to Sandisk. Memory and storage companies broadly sold off, and peers such as Micron showed similar weakness, which suggests investors are treating the move as a sector-wide reassessment rather than a verdict on Sandisk alone.
Why storage stocks wobbled
Two forces drove the selling. The first was a batch of mixed economic signals that left investors unsure about the broader backdrop. The second was uncertainty over how fast AI infrastructure buildouts will keep moving.
That uncertainty has been amplified by reported pauses in OpenAI's model training since late September. Training large AI models consumes enormous amounts of data, and that data has to live somewhere — so when one of the industry's biggest builders reportedly slows training, storage investors start questioning how much demand is really in the pipeline. Sandisk's market capitalization sat at approximately $230 to $243 billion during the downturn.
What comes next for Sandisk
The stock had surged more than 1,100% over the trailing 12 months through early October 2026, fueled by AI data-center demand as hyperscalers and AI labs need vast amounts of flash storage for training data, model checkpoints and inference workloads. The company posted substantial revenue and margin growth in recent quarters on the back of that demand.
Next up is fiscal Q1 2027 results, due on October 29, 2026. Strong numbers and confident guidance about AI customer orders could restore some of the lost confidence; soft guidance or signs of slowing orders could give the bears more ammunition. Investors will likely watch commentary on data-center demand and margin trends most closely, since pricing power in memory tends to erode first when demand softens.
Source: Crypto Briefing
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