The memory complex did the heavy lifting in AI trading, pulling the group out of a bruising July as Wall Street raised its numbers. SanDisk jumped 8 percent to $1,393, Micron gained 6 percent to $880, and SK Hynix climbed 4 percent to $148 in a single session, while Western Digital added 3 percent, Seagate rose 1 percent to $842, and the Roundhill Memory ETF advanced 5 percent to $54.
A rebound this sharp needed a deep slump to feed on. SanDisk entered the stretch down 26 percent over the prior month, and Micron's 15 percent slide marked its worst month since 2005. RBC Capital initiated SK Hynix at Outperform with a $200 target, Stifel rates it Buy at $240, and the consensus target on Micron sits at $1,522 against the $880 print. Valuations across the group remain uneven, from Micron below 20 times trailing earnings to Seagate above 64 times, which helps explain why the banks and the tape keep disagreeing about the same companies.
Fundamentals gave the target hikes something to stand on. Micron's datacenter revenue is running 346 percent above last year, and SanDisk's reached $1.47 billion, up 645 percent. "Micron's record fiscal Q3 financial results and even stronger outlook for Q4 reflect the strategic value of memory in the AI era," Micron chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra said.
Hard drives split the tape. Seagate carried momentum from a fiscal 2026 report that grew fourth-quarter revenue 48 percent year over year and produced a record $3.1 billion in free cash flow, with cloud data centers buying high-capacity nearline drives for AI workloads. The shares gained more than $100 across the two sessions following that release, and guidance calls for $4.1 billion of revenue in the current quarter.
Western Digital supplied the caution. Its fiscal fourth quarter delivered adjusted earnings of $3.56 per share on revenue of $3.75 billion, ahead of the $3.32 and $3.70 billion consensus marks and up 44 percent from a year earlier. The stock closed the session at $519.17, then dropped roughly 11.5 percent in extended trading to about $459. A 44 percent growth quarter that gets sold anyway suggests investors have started demanding more than clean beats from storage names.
Attention now shifts to Nvidia, where the argument has already begun. One widely shared piece of analysis carried the headline "Nvidia Stock Is A Steal Ahead Of Q2 Earnings", with consensus expectations near $92 billion in quarterly revenue, close to double a year earlier, before the company reports its second quarter. Prediction markets add their own read: Polymarket prices a 65.5 percent chance that Micron finishes August above $800. Whether either bet pays will depend on the next round of prints matching the numbers the banks just raised, and on demand holding at the pace the memory results describe.
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