SanDisk sees HBM generating half of revenue by 2027. The company outlined a new memory interface, RAMP-IO, that it says cuts data-movement energy by 90%, while ramping BiCS9 NAND samples by late next year.
SanDisk laid out a plan Wednesday to eventually generate half of its revenue from high-bandwidth memory chips, predicting the technology will reshape the memory hierarchy as artificial intelligence models demand more data movement.
The company is betting HBM will move beyond its current role as an AI accelerator companion into a core compute element, a shift Chief Technology Officer Alper Ilkbahar described as "inevitable." SanDisk is developing a new interface architecture it calls RAMP-IO that links compute and memory more directly, reducing the power lost moving data between separate chips.
The HBM forecast was part of a broader investor day presentation in which SanDisk also said it expects its total addressable market to grow at a 14 percent compound annual rate through 2029. The company guided for non-GAAP gross margins around 60 percent for the current fiscal year.
Management framed the HBM push as a strategic pivot from its traditional NAND flash business. Ilkbahar said the current compute memory hierarchy, where data shuffles between CPU, GPU, and separate memory pools, is hitting physical limits on power and bandwidth. "We need to bring the data to where the compute happens, or even bring the compute to where the data lives," he said.
SanDisk’s RAMP-IO architecture, still in development, aims to address that bottleneck. Ilkbahar said the design would cut the energy cost of data movement by roughly 90 percent versus current approaches. The interface would allow memory and logic dies to be stacked more densely, with tighter signaling paths, though the company did not give a target date for production.
The HBM revenue target is ambitious for a company whose HBM sales are still small relative to its NAND and SSD lines. Chief Financial Officer Luis Visoso said the memory market overall could reach $180 billion by 2029, with HBM making up a growing share. Asked by Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider about the pace of HBM adoption, Visoso said the ramp depends on how quickly the industry standardizes around the new interface architecture.
SanDisk also gave an update on its NAND roadmap. The company is ramping production of sixth-generation 3D NAND, which it calls BiCS7, and is on track to ship ninth-generation BiCS9 samples to select customers by the second half of next year. Chief Product Officer Khurram Ismail said BiCS9 will deliver a 30 percent increase in bit density over the current generation.
On enterprise SSDs, SanDisk sees a shift toward higher-capacity drives built around the E3.S form factor. Ismail said the company expects the average enterprise SSD capacity to double to eight terabytes within two years, driven by AI training data sets that grow roughly a thousandfold each generation.
The stock has gained about 18 percent year to date, roughly in line with the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index. SanDisk’s HBM push mirrors similar investments by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which already supply HBM to Nvidia. The difference is SanDisk is designing the memory and the interface together, rather than selling a standalone chip.
Several analysts on the call pressed for more detail on the RAMP-IO timeline. Ilkbahar said the company intends to disclose working prototypes in 12 to 18 months. He did not rule out licensing the architecture to other memory makers.
SanDisk’s stock market analysis shows the stock trading at about 22 times forward earnings, a discount to both Samsung and SK Hynix. The company did not update its capital allocation strategy, but Visoso said it expects to generate positive free cash flow in the current fiscal year after spending on BiCS7 and BiCS9 tooling.
The HBM bet carries execution risk. RAMP-IO needs an ecosystem of partners to adopt the interface before it becomes useful. The company acknowledged that winning that support is as important as the technology itself. Ilkbahar listed contract manufacturers and server builders as potential partners, naming no specific deals.
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