Sandisk

Sales to data centers hit 4.8 billion dollars last quarter, up 61% in three months and up from just 269 million dollars a year ago. That helped push total sales to 11 billion dollars, up 378% from last year, and Sandisk kept about 85 cents of every sales dollar after the cost of making its products.

Sandisk earned 8.1 billion dollars in profit last quarter and collected 6.4 billion dollars in cash from running its business. It spent 5 billion dollars buying back its own stock, about 4% of all its shares over two quarters. Customers have also signed multi-year deals worth 88.9 billion dollars in future sales, and Sandisk expects sales of 12.2 to 12.6 billion dollars next quarter.

Memory chip makers rise and fall with prices. Quarterly profit jumped from 112 million dollars a year ago to 8.1 billion dollars today, and a swing that big can reverse when new factories add supply and prices cool. Multi-year contracts add visibility but do not end the cycle. The stock fell about 13% the day after these results, a sign of how jumpy it is.

Sandisk gets nearly all of its memory wafers from factories it shares with its partner Kioxia, so any trouble there hits Sandisk directly. Consumer sales, like the memory cards and drives you buy in stores, also fell 39% from a year ago to 397 million dollars.