The rise of Sandisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) has been one of the biggest stories on the stock market over the past couple of years. The maker of NAND flash drives and solid-state storage drives for data centers and AI applications has been on a run that’s rarely been matched in recent years.
Sandisk was a public company from 1995 to 2016, when Western Digital acquired it. Sandisk went public in February 2025 at $38 per share after spinning off from Western Digital.
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But when it went public, it hit right in the middle of the AI storage supercycle, with demand far outpacing supply. This created insatiable demand for Sandisk’s drives and allowed it to have a huge amount of pricing power. The combination produced an earnings powerhouse.
Investors started piling into Sandisk stock, and over the course of its roughly a year and a half as a public company, the stock price soared 3,136% to the current price of $1,246 per share. On an annualized basis, this comes to an average return of 718% over the past 18 months since the IPO.
And as wild as that is, Sandisk stock had peaked at $2,335 per share on June 25, which, at the time, was some 6,500% above the price it debuted at.
Stock-split time
The meteoric rise of Sandisk makes it a candidate for a stock split. When stock prices reach four-digit territory, companies often decide to split their stock.
With a stock split, a single share is split into multiple shares — how many depends on the company.
This year, we saw a massive 25-for-1 stock split by Booking Holdings on April 2. That meant that every one share of Booking stock, which traded at a whopping $4,250 per share at the time of the split, was split into 25 shares. That brought the price down to around $170 per share.
CrowdStrike also conducted a 4-for-1 stock split on July 2. That brought the CrowdStrike share price from $774 per share before the split to around $193 per share.
Companies typically conduct stock splits to attract new investors by lowering the share price. They may also do it to provide employees with stock-based compensation or to lower their share price for stock repurchases. Sometimes it does help boost the share price, like with Booking, which surged about 10% in the two weeks after the split to $191 per share. But that’s not always the case.
