‘Apple and Microsoft Look Like Value Stocks’: Morningstar on SanDisk’s 2,107% Year
A single flash-memory stock has quietly redrawn the boundary between growth and value investing, leaving retirement savers in supposedly defensive index funds holding far more AI-cycle risk than they realize.
2,107% in One Year
SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK | SNDK Price Prediction) is up 2,107% over the past year, a run so extreme that it caught Morningstar’s chief global markets editor Tom Lauricella’s attention. He says it has done something no memory-chip cycle was supposed to do: reclassify the two largest companies in the S&P 500 as discount trades. “Apple and Microsoft look like value stocks just because of where they are in the rankings,” Lauricella said, describing how the AI storage buildout is bending index construction around a single flash-memory supplier.
The anchor figure is a one-year total-return calculation cited in the Morningstar framing. Fuse-aggregated pricing shows a closely related reading: a 2,107.79% one-year change from $73.92 on Sept. 10, 2025, to $1,632.11 on Sept. 11, 2026.
What It Means Operationally
Fundamentals are doing the heavy lifting alongside any multiple expansion. SanDisk’s fiscal Q4 report on Aug. 5, 2026 showed revenue of $8.96B, up 371.6% YoY, and non-GAAP EPS of $39.25 versus a $33.28 consensus, the fifth consecutive beat. GAAP gross margin reached 84.6%, up 58.4 percentage points year over year, and operating income of $7.037B came off a base so small that the year-over-year change registered 38,994%.
The Datacenter segment is where the AI narrative earns its keep. Datacenter revenue was $2.977B in Q4 and full-year segment revenue rose 437%. Management said sequential growth was roughly one-third volume and two-thirds pricing, and that the pipeline includes five additional New Business Model agreements since the April call, featuring three new customers alongside a pair of expansions. SanDisk is a cash cow: free cash flow was $7.083B in the quarter and $11.494B for fiscal 2026.
Market Reaction and Peer Scoreboard
SanDisk closed the most recent session with a one-day move of -2.98%, but it is up 28.4% over the past month and 587.9% YTD. That performance is what forces the value-index math. Over the same 12 months, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is up 0.18%, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is up 47.05%, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) is up 24.84%, Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) is up 377.84%, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM) is up 67.18%.
According to Lauricella’s team, that scoreboard is why value indexes have moved from 11% technology at end-2024 to roughly 20% technology currently. Amazon now boasts the largest holding in the Russell Large Value Index at 6%. The retirement investor who owns a “value” ETF as a defensive sleeve is holding more AI-cycle exposure than the label suggests.
Bull Case
The fundamentals behind the price line are doing real work. SanDisk’s full fiscal 2026 revenue was $20.248B, up 175.3%, with non-GAAP EPS of $70.88 and net income of $11.433B. Guidance points higher: Q1 FY27 revenue of $10.30B to $10.80B, non-GAAP EPS of $44.00 to $46.00, and GAAP gross margin of 83.0% to 84.9%. Forward analyst estimates have been moving up, with the fiscal 2027 average EPS estimate rising to 214.10 from 175.38 90 days ago, and 12 upward EPS revisions versus seven downward over the trailing 30 days.
Capital return is scaled to match. The board approved an additional $14B buyback, bringing remaining authorization to $15.5B on a market capitalization of $239.4 billion. Balance-sheet leverage is negligible at debt-to-equity of 0.025, and the forward P/E sits at 8 against an analyst target of $2,125.09. Peer Western Digital guided Q1 FY27 revenue to roughly $4.1B, up 42% to 49% year over year, corroborating the storage-cycle strength that SanDisk is monetizing on the flash side.
Bottom Line
The 2,107% performance is a symptom of two forces stacking on each other: NAND pricing that has snapped back, and Datacenter demand tied to AI infrastructure that is running at triple-digit growth. For long-term investors, the metric is a prompt to examine what they actually own in supposedly boring index products rather than a chart-chasing cue.
The next dated catalyst in the provided data is corporate rather than operational: S&P Dow Jones Indices announced on Sept. 4, 2026 that SanDisk is among companies joining major S&P benchmarks, which will pull passive flows into a stock already trading at $1,632.11. When the biggest one-year winner in memory redraws the map of what counts as growth and what counts as value, chances are the label on the sleeve of your portfolio is not the risk you signed up for.
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Gerelyn Terzo is the author of dividend investing handbook "Dividend Investing Strategies: How to Have Your Cake & Eat It Too." A veteran financial journalist, she covers agri-finance for outlets like Global AgInvesting and the broader stock market and personal finance for 24/7 Wall Street. She began at CNBC and later helped launch Fox Business in New York. Gerelyn currently resides in Woodland Park, Colorado and dabbles in nature photography as a hobby.
