MILPITAS, Calif.—SanDisk’s chief executive has spent years listening to customers describe their demand in three-month windows, and he says the era of short planning horizons is over. Speaking on the company’s earnings call on Aug. 6, after the close of U.S. markets, CEO David Goeckeler said SanDisk has signed long-term agreements with eight customers spanning data centers and edge computing, locking in contracted memory volumes that will account for more than half of the company’s total bit shipments in fiscal 2027 and roughly two-thirds in fiscal 2028. “In the past, we could only predict demand three months out,” he said. “Now we hold four or more years of locked-in purchase volumes and a clear profitability model.”
The agreements, which the company calls NBM deals, represent a structural shift in how memory is bought and sold. For decades, the industry’s core problem was the opposite of this one: memory makers built capacity on faith, then watched prices collapse when demand failed to appear. The new contracts flip the risk, giving SanDisk the visibility that its customers historically refused to provide. Some of the company’s largest clients, Goeckeler said, have returned within a quarter of signing to add more volume, an early sign that the demand environment is extraordinarily strong, particularly in data centers.
The deal structure matters as much as the numbers. Long-term memory contracts typically include volume commitments, pricing formulas and penalties for shortfall, and they tie the fortunes of buyer and seller together for years. For SanDisk, the agreements convert its flash memory products into a contracted business, the kind of arrangement that investors value because it reduces earnings volatility. For customers, the appeal is security of supply: in a market where memory is scarce and prices are rising, a long-term deal with a major supplier is worth more than a few points of price advantage.
The context for the announcement is a memory market that has swung violently from glut to shortage. SanDisk, which was spun off from Western Digital in 2025, is one of the world’s largest makers of NAND flash memory, the storage used in everything from smartphones to AI servers. The company’s financial performance has improved sharply as prices for NAND have rebounded from the industry’s 2022-23 downturn, and the earnings call painted a picture of a company in the middle of a windfall. The question for investors is whether the boom is sustainable; the NBM agreements are management’s answer.
The AI angle is central to the story. The largest new demand for memory is coming from data centers building AI infrastructure, which consume far more storage and memory per server than traditional cloud workloads. Goeckeler described the data center segment as particularly strong, and the eight NBM customers include both hyperscale cloud providers and edge computing specialists, a spread the company said gives it a diversified base of contracted demand. Edge computing, which processes data closer to where it is generated, is expected to be one of the fastest-growing parts of the market over the next several years.
The announcements also come at a moment when the memory industry’s structure is changing. The four companies that dominate advanced memory—Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron and now SanDisk as a standalone NAND maker—have all signaled that they intend to behave more rationally than in past cycles, prioritizing profitability over market share. Long-term agreements are the mechanism that makes that discipline possible, and SanDisk’s eight deals are among the most explicit commitments announced by any supplier. Analysts said the terms of the contracts suggest customers are paying a premium for guaranteed supply, a bet that AI demand will outlast the current shortage.
The risk for SanDisk is that the market turns before the contracts do. Memory prices have a long history of collapsing when supply catches up with demand, and the company’s projections assume that AI-driven consumption continues to grow at its current pace. If that growth slows, customers with multiyear commitments could find themselves holding more memory than they need, and renegotiating contracts in a falling market is a painful process. SanDisk’s management acknowledged the uncertainty but argued that the breadth of its customer base and the long duration of the agreements make the position more secure than in past cycles.
For the industry as a whole, the NBM deals are evidence that memory is being reclassified as a strategic resource. The chips that store the world’s AI models are no longer commodity components bought at spot prices; they are contracted infrastructure, planned years in advance like power plants or pipelines. That shift has profound implications: it gives suppliers the revenue certainty to fund new factories, it gives customers the security to build server fleets, and it changes the shape of the memory cycle itself. If contracts smooth the booms and busts, the industry’s infamous volatility may finally moderate.
Goeckeler’s framing on the call was characteristically blunt. Four years of locked-in demand, he said, changes the conversation between supplier and customer from “how much can you sell me this quarter” to “how much can we plan together.” The distinction is the difference between a cyclical commodity business and a contracted infrastructure business, and SanDisk is betting its future on the latter. With eight agreements signed, more than half of 2027 output spoken for and customers asking for more, the company’s bet is that the memory market has entered a new phase. The eight signatures on those contracts suggest its customers believe it too.
