Sandisk stock was falling late Wednesday after a disappointing outlook from the memory maker seemed to overshadow strong results from the recent quarter.
Sandisk reported fiscal fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of $39.25 on revenue of $8.97 billion. Analysts surveyed by FactSet were expecting earnings of $34.96 per share on revenue of $8.48 billion.
Sandisk said it expects fiscal first-quarter revenue to be between $10.3 billion and $10.8 billion. That's below Wall Street estimates of $10.82 billion.
Shares were down 8% in after-hours trading following the results.
This is breaking news. Please come back for more updates and analysis and read below for a preview of the earnings.
Sandisk is expected to report massive earnings and revenue growth on Wednesday night as memory demand and hardware spending continues to soar.
The storage and memory maker is scheduled to post fiscal fourth-quarter financials after the stock market closes. Analysts surveyed by FactSet expect Sandisk to report adjusted earnings of $34.96 per share on revenue of $8.48 billion.
In the same period last year, the company posted earnings of 29 cents per share on revenue of $1.9 billon.
It's no secret that there's been incredibly high demand for the hardware that's needed to help power artificial intelligence. Demand for these components is far outpacing supply, leading hardware makers to boost prices. That's been a major boon for Sandisk, which has seen revenue growth surge in its data center segment.
Analysts expect fourth-quarter data center revenue to total $2.74 billion. Sandisk introduced its data center segment for the first time when reporting fiscal first-quarter earnings on Nov. 6. Data center revenue at the time was $269 million.
Massive cloud providers, such as Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, and Alphabet, have reported their latest batch of quarterly results in recent weeks. Hyperscalers are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers as the need for AI computing power keeps growing. Memory costs have been a major catalyst, prompting those companies to raise capex expectations.
"We now believe we will spend approximately $220 billion in cash CapEx in 2026. The higher cost of memory pushing this number up from our prior estimate of about $200 billion," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the company's earnings call in July. "But even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, and I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027, too."
Sandisk investors have been reaping the benefits of this massive demand cycle. Shares have soared 500% this year and 3,283% over the past 12 months.
However, Sandisk stock dropped 47% in July -- marking its worst month on record -- as investors rotated out of AI hardware stocks that have seen major gains in recent months. There's also been a general concern among some on Wall Street that the ongoing spending for memory and other components isn't sustainable long-term.
Commentary from tech companies indicates this massive demand cycle isn't going away anytime soon, though. Sandisk earnings are expected to prove that.
