Memory Shortage Boosts Sandisk — and May Kill Personal Computers

Artificial intelligence causes memory problems, and we’re not talking about relying on bots to do your homework. 

The AI gold rush has created a brand new shortage in computer memory infrastructure, flipping the entire tech world upside-down by making this unglamorous low-margin business suddenly and somewhat shockingly hot. Last year, that made memory darling Sandisk one of the best performers on the S&P 500. Will the run continue in 2026? Early indications say yes.

Short-Term Memory Loss

The hyperscalers have hyperscaled, pushing memory-makers to the brink. Industry peer Micron told CNBC earlier this month that it’s “already sold out for 2026.” Memory typically accounts for about one-fifth of most hardware costs, meaning that for everyone else, competing with hyperscalers has come with a steep price increase. Shares of Nintendo, for instance, plummeted through the close of 2025 as the cost of memory in its Switch 2 hardware skyrocketed more than 40% in the final quarter; last week, president Shuntaro Furukawa said the company “must monitor the situation closely,” though he declined to comment on the hypothetical of raising console prices.

Last year, memory supplier SanDisk split off from data storage firm Western Digital in February, just in time for the boom. Moving forward, it will have to walk the tightrope of reinvesting in production capacity to service clients without giving away its supply advantage:

• Shares of Sandisk scored an incredible 559% total return in 2025 after leaving the Western Digital nest, making it one of the best performers in the entire S&P 500. Shares of the company have already risen another 50% since the turn of the calendar.
• Still, Sandisk leaders told The Wall Street Journal last week they remain hyper-aware of the boom-and-bust cycles the memory industry has historically faced. The company expects to increase capital expenditures by 18% in its current fiscal year, which ends in June, despite an expected 44% revenue jump.

“We need to get the economics right to be able to continue to invest that money and not go through these huge episodic periods of losing money,” Sandisk CEO David Goeckeler told the WSJ, while suggesting hyperscalers commit to supply agreements “longer than three months at a time.”

PC Culture: The recent run on memory supply has some DIY PC-builders remembering — and fretting over — a bold prediction made by Jeff Bezos at The New York Times DealBook Summit in 2024: As hyperscalers suck up resources, Bezos predicted the personal computing industry may go the way of the dodo, with most future consumers instead renting compute power from cloud providers. Given Amazon’s massive cloud services business, we’ll say that, in this case, “predict” may as well be synonymous with “hope.”