If you've got some cash ready to invest, right now storage companies seem like a tempting option. In the last 12 months the share prices of SanDisk, Western Digital and Seagate Technology have all soared, with SanDisk recording a huge 822.11% growth during this period. Even since the start of 2026 SanDisk's stock price has risen 44.21%, likely helped by increased tech exposure from this year's CES.
But what could be causing this stratospheric rise in fortune for the big memory manufacturers? Well, it's our old friend AI, of course. AI data processing centers devour high-bandwidth memory and fast SSD storage, causing AI companies to buy up huge stocks of solid state memory. This in turn is having a knock-on effect in other sectors that require DRAM and NAND flash memory.
We've already seen forecasts that camera phone prices could rise this year, as manufacturers of such consumer electronics have to fight for the remaining memory stock after the AI tech giants like Google, Meta, Nvidia and Open AI have paid top dollar to fuel their data centers. Prograde Digital has also reported that it's set to significantly hike prices of its memory cards in Japan, due to the same memory cost increases caused by AI infrastructure development. Prograde's memory cards expected to rise by anywhere between 3.2% and as much as 123%, depending on the particular card in question.
Story credit: Digital Camera Life (translated from Japansese)
