Sandisk leads S&P 500 with 3,000% gain since spinoff

Sandisk (SNDK) shares have risen more than 3,000% since the company began trading independently in February 2025. Yahoo Finance reporter Julie Hyman identified Sandisk as the top-performing stock in the S&P 500 (^GSPC) during the current bull market period, a ranking that places it ahead of Palantir, Vertiv, Nvidia, and Micron.

The performance metric covers the period following Western Digital's (WDC) spinoff of its flash memory unit. According to Yahoo Finance data, Sandisk started trading as a separate entity at $52 per share in February 2025. As of 2 p.m. ET, the stock traded at $1,479, giving the company a market capitalization exceeding $200 billion. Sandisk shares declined on Monday following a memory innovation announced by a Chinese company.

The stock's ascent aligns with increased demand for NAND data storage technology, which the source attributes to the expansion of AI data centers and companies training generative AI models. In recent quarters, Sandisk's data center segment has generated between a quarter and a third of its total revenue. This shift has coincided with an AI memory supply bottleneck that has provided memory manufacturers with significant pricing power.

During an investor day in August, Sandisk management outlined a financial outlook for the period between 2028 and 2030. The company projected annual revenue growth in the mid-to-high teens and forecast non-GAAP gross margins of approximately 80%. While Sandisk outpaces other memory peers, Micron (MU) has also delivered strong returns, gaining 979% since Sandisk's IPO date. Micron produces DRAM, high-bandwidth memory, and NAND.

The broader market rally has been driven by the AI infrastructure buildout, which began coinciding with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT. This trend has benefited various sectors of the technology supply chain. Nvidia designs the chips and hardware used in data centers, Palantir develops the software for the application layer, and Vertiv manufactures technology to regulate power and temperatures in data centers. Palantir ranks second in S&P 500 performance with a gain of 2,490%, followed by Vertiv at 2,125%, Nvidia at 1,894%, and Micron at 1,851%.