New York, New York
— February 1, 2026
Sandisk ( SNDK )and Apple ( AAPL ): The AI Memory Trade Comes Into Focus
Sandisk is up roughly 1,500% in just five months, while Apple’s iPhone revenue just hit all-time highs.
This is part three of our earnings rapid-fire series, covering what you need to know from Sandisk and Apple two very different businesses each facing their own headwinds and tailwinds in the AI Revolution.
Sandisk: From Niche Player to AI Infrastructure Winner
Five months ago, Sandisk was a $7 billion company. Today, it’s worth roughly $85 billion.
The obvious question: Can this growth continue?
The short answer is yes — and the numbers explain why.
Sandisk just delivered a standout quarter:
- Revenue up 61% to $3 billion
- Gross margins expanded from 33% to 51%, an 18-point jump
But this isn’t just about backward-looking results. Management expects growth to accelerate. Revenue for the current quarter is projected at $4.6 billion, implying a staggering 170% year-over-year increase, with margins expected to move even higher.
So where is all this demand coming from?
Memory Is the AI Bottleneck
AI infrastructure doesn’t just run on GPUs. It also runs on memory.
Memory acts as the bridge between past inputs and future outputs which allows large language models and AI systems to store context, retrieve information, and respond intelligently. As models scale and workloads grow, memory has become the primary bottleneck across AI infrastructure.
That bottleneck is driving:
- Rapid price increases
- Tight supply-demand dynamics
- Explosive earnings leverage for memory providers
Companies like Sandisk and Micron are benefiting directly. As Sandisk’s CEO put it on the earnings call, the company has effectively traded low-margin business for high-margin business. Combine that mix shift with pricing power, and you get exactly the type of earnings inflection the market is responding to.
Apple: Records, Resilience, and Margin Discipline
Turning to Apple, it’s notable how quickly macro concerns like tariffs have faded from the narrative. Investors are now focused on two things:
- Memory costs (see above 😉) and device margins
- Apple’s AI developments, specifically its recently announced partnership with Google Gemini
On the margin front, Tim Cook and team reassured investors that gross margins will remain stable at least through next quarter, suggesting Apple is using supply-chain leverage and backend optimizations to offset rising memory costs.
On the AI front, there were no major updates regarding Google Gemini but the lack of surprises didn’t matter much given the strength elsewhere in the business. We should expect to get more on that in subsequent quarters.
Apple posted record results and new all times highs left and right. For example:
- iPhone revenue hit $85 billion
- High-margin services revenue reached $30 billion
- Total quarterly revenue came in at $144 billion
The stock moved modestly higher post-earnings and continues to grind upward after recovering from its 2025 drawdown.
The Bigger Picture
Sandisk and Apple highlight two different ways companies are winning in the AI era.
Sandisk is a pure infrastructure beneficiary, riding memory shortages and pricing power as AI demand explodes. That said it can also unwind quickly as they don’t have nearly the same moat as other tech companies. Apple, meanwhile, continues to prove that scale, ecosystem control, and margin discipline still matter even as component costs fluctuate.
Different businesses. Same underlying theme: AI is quietly reshaping earnings power across the stack.
We’ll be back next week as earnings season continues with Palantir ( PLTR ), AMD ( AMD ), Google ( GOOG ), and Amazon ( AMZN ).
Be good!
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