Micron, SanDisk price targets soar to a number Wall Street rarely writes
Wall Street has a comfortable habit when it comes to memory chips. For 40 years, analysts treated companies like Micron the way you'd treat a fishing boat: useful, occasionally lucrative, but always at the mercy of a tide nobody controls.
Prices boom, everyone piles in, supply floods the market, prices crash, and the stock gets cheap again. The cycle was so reliable that investors built it into the valuation, refusing to pay up for earnings they assumed would evaporate.
That assumption is what makes this week strange.
Memory and storage stocks have spent 2026 doing something they are not supposed to do, which is go straight up and stay there.
And on Friday, May 29, one Wall Street firm decided the old rulebook no longer applies, attaching a pair of price targets to Micron and SanDisk that sit higher than anything else on the Street.
Why the memory chip story matters more than the headline number
Before getting to the targets, it helps to understand what these companies actually sell, because the news only lands if you know why anyone cares.
Micron (MU) makes two kinds of memory. One is DRAM, the fast, short-term memory that lets a computer juggle tasks. The other is NAND, the storage that holds your data when the power is off. SanDisk (SNDK) focuses on NAND flash and the solid-state drives built from it.
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Here is the part that changed everything. Artificial intelligence systems are ravenous for both. Training and running large AI models requires enormous pools of high-bandwidth memory sitting next to the chips that do the math, plus mountains of storage to feed them.
When demand for AI accelerators from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices exploded, the demand for the memory wrapped around them exploded, too. Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung control nearly the entire DRAM market, so there was no flood of new supply waiting to crash prices. For once, the boat had the tide on its side.
The numbers back that up. Micron, Western Digital, SanDisk, and Seagate Technology all rallied sharply this year as enthusiasm around AI infrastructure spending kept building, according to The Fly. Micron crossed $1 trillion in market value for the first time on May 26.
Photo by CFOTO on Getty Images
Susquehanna raises Micron and SanDisk price targets
Now the part everyone was waiting for.
Susquehanna analyst Mehdi Hosseini raised his price target on Micron to $1,750 from $600, and lifted his SanDisk target to $3,250 from $2,000, both new Wall Street highs, according to Investing.com. He kept a positive rating on each.
The reasoning comes down to pricing and scarcity.
"DRAM strength is being driven by commodity pricing as a greater share of DRAM bits are allocated to HBM and server applications," Hosseini wrote in a note to clients. In plain terms, the most profitable use of memory right now is feeding AI servers, so that is where the supply is going.
Related: Veteran analyst shares blunt message on Sandisk stock after rally
His channel checks point to second-quarter DRAM average selling prices rising 50% to 60% from the prior quarter, with NAND prices climbing 75% to 100%, according to Stocktwits. When the price of what you sell jumps that fast and you can't make it any faster, profits follow.
The supply piece is the real argument. "Supply is now expected to remain tight through 2027, sustaining elevated margins and thus warranting valuation re-rating," Hosseini wrote, Investing.com reported.
What struck me when I lined up the analyst notes against the actual stock moves was how fast the consensus is sprinting to catch up. This is the fifth time in the past year that the average price target on Micron has jumped more than 10% in a single week, Sherwood News indicated.
When I ran the recent target hikes side by side, every major firm is revising in the same direction, and most are still landing below where the stock already trades.
Here is how the recent wave of Micron targets stacks up:
- Susquehanna: $1,750, the new Street high, according to Seeking Alpha
- UBS: $1,625, set earlier this week by Timothy Arcuri, reported The Motley Fool
- DA Davidson: $1,500, with a Buy rating, according to Investing.com
- Barclays: $1,175, citing customer supply agreements, Investing.com noted.
- Mizuho: $1,150, on expectations of strong demand, Investing.com reported.
How the AI memory shortage reshapes what investors own
The bigger backdrop explains why analysts feel safe making calls this aggressive.
Market research firm TrendForce expects memory revenue to surge 134% to $552 billion in 2026, followed by another 53% jump to $843 billion in 2027, according to The Motley Fool. The firm said NAND flash pricing remains resilient, thanks to strong demand and constrained supply.
Hosseini flagged one technical reason the shortage may stick around. Changes to how AI systems handle something called KV Cache offloading have discouraged chipmakers from aggressively adding new wafer capacity, Investing.com shared. Fewer new factories means supply stays tight, and tight supply keeps prices up.
There is a catch worth respecting. Hosseini noted that tight memory supply is starting to constrain how many systems manufacturers can build, with some server and storage shipments likely pushed into early 2027, according to Seeking Alpha's account of the note. A shortage that helps Micron's pricing can hurt the companies trying to buy its chips.
And the rally is not risk-free. Even the UBS analyst who set a $1,625 target warned the stock could fall to $250 if high-bandwidth memory demand weakens, reported The Motley Fool.
The math that justifies these targets assumes the AI buildout keeps going. If it slows, the same cyclicality everyone thought was dead comes roaring back.
What this memory rally means for your portfolio
So why should you care if you do not own a single chip stock?
Because if you hold an S&P 500index fund, a target-date retirement fund, or almost any large-cap tech position, you already own a slice of this trade. Micron alone is now one of the 10 most valuable companies in the country, which means its swings move the indexes that sit inside most 401(k) accounts.
The deeper signal is what these targets say about how Wall Street now values the picks and shovels of AI. For decades, memory was the commodity nobody wanted to pay for. Right now, it is being repriced as core AI infrastructure, the same way investors learned to value the chips that do the calculations.
That shift cuts both ways. If you believe AI spending has years left to run, these companies have the supply discipline and the pricing power to keep delivering. If you think the buildout is closer to a peak, a stock up several hundred percent in a year is exactly the kind of position that falls hardest when the mood turns.
Watch two things from here:
- Whether second-quarter pricing actually lands in the 50% to 100% range Hosseini is modeling.
- Whether the companies buying all this memory start warning about shortages of their own, which would tell you the boom is straining the very system it is supposed to be powering.
The targets are a bet that this time is different. The next two quarters will start to show whether that bet pays.
Related: Analyst who predicted Micron rally has new message
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This story was originally published May 31, 2026 at 5:33 AM.