Hoping phone prices will stabilize or even drop in the next year or two? SanDisk has bad news for you. In its quarterly earnings call last night, SanDisk said about two-thirds of its fiscal 2028 flash storage supply is already locked into long-term deals, mostly with data center customers. It also said it expects storage demand to grow more than twice as fast as supply next year.
SanDisk reported $11.03 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 378% from a year ago. A little less than half of that came from data centers alone, at $4.80 billion, up 61% in just three months.
AI companies have already called dibs on SanDisk’s storage
Like RAM companies, SanDisk also sells most of its flash storage through long-term agreements it calls NBMs, where customers commit to buying set amounts of storage years in advance.
The company’s CFO Luis Visoso said that “about 50% of our bits are under NBM for ’27 and about 2/3 for ’28”. SanDisk’s fiscal year 2028 runs from mid 2027 to mid 2028.
Visoso also said that the NBM pipeline “exceeds our supply throughout the end of the decade.” CEO David Goeckeler added that some customers “have underestimated the amount of NAND they need to run their infrastructure” and that there are “multiple customers coming back for a second round.”
Basically, AI companies are buying storage years in advance, and phone makers are fighting for the leftovers.
We’ve already seen what this does to the devices you buy. Mobile DRAM prices were set to double this year, Samsung raised prices on the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Flip 7 mid-cycle, and the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s 1TB model hit record pricing. With Samsung planning more memory price hikes and Galaxy S27 storage upgrades expected to cost even more, SanDisk’s outlook fits right in. Visoso said the company expects prices to “continue to increase modestly throughout the year.”
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