A message from our friends at i2i Marketing Group, LLC 
When the #1 Silver Producer Buys In... You Might Want to Pay Attention Global producers almost never take significant equity positions in early-stage juniors - yet one of the world's largest silver companies just acquired a 17% stake in this small cap. Moves like this often signal conviction: conviction in the asset, conviction in the team, and conviction in what future exploration may reveal. Combined with silver's accelerating price action and tightening supply, the timing becomes even more interesting. This early-stage name now controls three 100%-owned projects in Mexico's top mineral belts, including a newly acquired district-scale asset. The question for investors: what did a major see before the market did?
Thursday's Bonus News The Memory Supercycle Is Here—2 Winners From 1 BreakupSubmitted by Jeffrey Neal Johnson. Publication Date: 2/4/2026. 
Article Highlights - SanDisk is experiencing explosive growth driven by the need for high-speed drives that save the progress of artificial intelligence models during training.
- Western Digital is securing its position as a pillar of stability by returning capital to shareholders while providing the data lakes needed for storage.
- A shortage of manufacturing capacity for standard memory chips has created a favorable supply environment, supporting durable pricing power for the industry.
While the broader stock market has spent years fixated on the processors that allow artificial intelligence (AI) to operate, a massive rotation is underway into the hardware that gives AI memory. Approximately one year ago, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) spun off its flash-memory business, creating SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) as a standalone company. The market response has been dramatic. SanDisk has surged roughly 1,500% since listing in early 2025, including a 140% gain in the past 30 days. As of Feb. 3, 2026, SanDisk stock is trading near all-time highs around $665. Its former parent, Western Digital, has also seen strong gains, rising about 350% over the last year to trade in the $280–$290 range. Trump Ally Says Congress Approved the Setup for a Digital Dollar 2.0
But according to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, it's a bill that contains "the entire setup, groundwork and infrastructure to move from cash to digital currency." >>> Click Here before it becomes law. That divergence signals the start of a memory supercycle. AI infrastructure has bifurcated the storage market into two necessary lanes: extreme speed and massive capacity. The split of SanDisk and Western Digital unlocked value by letting each company specialize, creating two distinct investment profiles. SanDisk: The Vertical Growth Engine SanDisk is trading as a high-octane proxy for AI processing speed. The company's recent results show this rally is driven more by fundamentals than by pure speculation. In its Jan. 29, 2026 earnings report, SanDisk delivered numbers that surprised the Street: - Revenue: $3.03 billion, a 61% increase year-over-year.
- Earnings Per Share (EPS): $6.20, beating Wall Street estimates by nearly $3.
- Gross margins: Expanded to 51.1%, up sharply from 29.9% in the prior quarter.
But the bigger catalyst is forward guidance. Management projects next-quarter EPS will roughly double sequentially to $12–$14. That outlook implies that, despite the run-up in the share price, the price-to-earnings ratio is compressing on a forward basis — making the stock arguably cheaper relative to expected earnings. The rapid earnings growth is driven by a technical phenomenon known as AI checkpointing. When massive AI models are trained, they must frequently save progress to avoid catastrophic data loss if a system fails. A crash that loses training progress can waste millions in electricity and time. To avoid this, data centers use SanDisk's enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs) to write enormous volumes of data almost instantly. That demand is inelastic — many firms cannot afford to train large models without high-performance storage. As a result, SanDisk is forecasting gross margins of 65%–67% next quarter, indicating substantial pricing power. Wall Street has moved quickly to update expectations. Following the report, UBS lifted its price target to $1,000, Cantor Fitzgerald moved to $800, and both Barclays and Citigroup boosted targets to $750. These upward revisions from major firms — combined with others — suggest the market had underestimated demand for high-speed storage. Western Digital: The Value Fortress While SanDisk chases aggressive growth, Western Digital has positioned itself as a fortress of stability and capital return. The company focuses on cold storage — the massive repositories where raw data accumulates before processing. On Feb. 3, 2026, Western Digital's board authorized an additional $4 billion in share repurchases, signaling management's view that the stock remains undervalued despite recent gains. Western Digital reported $3.02 billion in revenue for fiscal Q2, up 25% year-over-year. Unlike the volatile flash market, the hard disk drive (HDD) market offers stability. AI training datasets consist of petabytes of raw video, text, and images; storing that on flash is prohibitively expensive, so much of it sits in data lakes built on Western Digital's high-capacity drives. Key points in the Western Digital thesis: - The 100TB roadmap: WDC outlined a path to 100-terabyte drives, which will be important for hyperscalers.
- UltraSMR adoption: New UltraSMR drives — including current 32TB and upcoming 40TB models — now account for more than half of shipments, supporting margin expansion.
- Long-term agreements: The company has purchase agreements with major customers extending through 2028.
For income-focused investors, Western Digital offers a yield narrative, combining the $4 billion buyback authorization with a quarterly cash dividend of $0.125 per share. The Wafer Wars & Zero-Sum Supply Chain Some investors worry that rapid price gains in memory will spur overinvestment and a subsequent glut. This cycle looks different because of a zero-sum constraint in manufacturing. Semiconductor fabs are prioritizing High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which is physically stacked onto AI processors. Fabs can only process a limited number of silicon wafers each month. The shift toward HBM reduces the wafer supply available for standard flash memory and storage controllers. That physical limitation creates a supply floor — manufacturers cannot instantly flood the market with chips because wafer capacity is constrained. This dynamic supports a more durable pricing environment for both SanDisk and Western Digital. SanDisk has also taken steps to secure its medium-term supply. The company recently extended its joint venture with Kioxia through 2034, locking in wafer supply and removing a key operational risk. On the technology front, SanDisk is developing an architecture called High Bandwidth Flash (HBF). Unlike traditional storage, HBF places flash memory closer to the processor and could handle certain AI inference tasks that today require more expensive DRAM. If successful, HBF could expand SanDisk's total addressable market and help justify a premium valuation. The Storage Supercycle: Sprinters and Marathon Runners The AI trade has evolved. It is no longer only about the logic chips that do the thinking; it's also about the gravity of the data itself. The SanDisk spin-off has been a strategic win, creating two complementary investment profiles from the same original business. SanDisk offers high-beta exposure to AI's immediate need for processing speed — a volatile but rapidly growing earnings story. Western Digital offers a lower-volatility, income-and-capital-return profile tied to long-term data growth. In the 2026 economy, portfolios may find room for both the sprinter (SanDisk) and the marathon runner (Western Digital).
| 
Comments
Post a Comment