As Sandisk prepares to report earnings on Thursday, Wall Street is expecting another blowout quarter powered by strong artificial-intelligence demand. Some on social media are wondering if the report will also bring the announcement of a stock split that brings the high-flying share price back down to earth for retail investors.

A shortage of memory and storage solutions has led shares of Sandisk to rally 3,130% in the past year and trade at $1,064. Up over 350% year to date, Sandisk is the best-performing member of the S&P 500 Index in 2026.

The four-figure price tag makes Sandisk a prime candidate for a stock split, in which a company divides its shares into smaller units to lower the price and increase liquidity. The company’s overall market capitalization remains unaffected.

For Sandisk, a 10-for-1 stock split would reset the price to the low triple digits, which can be psychologically more appealing to retail investors. A lower price would also improve liquidity in the options market, as each standard option contract represents 100 underlying shares.

Sandisk has become an increasingly popular AI stock among retail investors ever since it spun out of Western Digital in February 2025. Net retail buying in the stock has surged alongside the stock price, with hundreds of millions of dollars of shares exchanging hands daily, according to an April report from JPMorgan analyst Arun Jain. Sandisk consistently ranks among the top stocks and options traded by retail investors, Jain added.

Sandisk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ahead of the report, some social-media users have speculated about the potential for a split.

There’s past precedent for stock splits among AI infrastructure names. In June 2024, Nvidia announced a 10-for-1 stock split, kicking off a trend among semiconductor companies. In the following months, Broadcom, Lam Research and Super Micro Computer followed suit with their own 10-for-1 splits. However, the momentum leading up to the stock split hasn’t always been sustainable: Shares of Super Micro initially popped on the news but are down 37% since the split.

While a stock split could certainly be in the cards, management might hesitate while the entire memory industry is in the middle of a massive transformation, Ed Yardeni, president of financial-research firm Yardeni Research, told MarketWatch.

Semiconductor stocks have historically been cyclical, experiencing boom-and-bust phases from supply-demand mismatches. Winning stocks can quickly plummet once “irrational exuberance is taken out of the stock,” Yardeni said.

The narrative surrounding memory chips could evolve once major AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic go public later this year. If their financial disclosures paint a different demand picture than the one currently expected by investors, then prices could correct, according to Yardeni. The fragility of the AI trade was on full display Tuesday, when a Wall Street Journal report saying that OpenAI missed internal revenue targets sent shares of Oracle, CoreWeave, Microsoft, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom lower.

Demand for Sandisk shares remains elevated at the current price, meaning that there’s no immediate necessity to lower the price to attract more buyers, Yardeni added. But he’s not ruling out the possibility completely. As a result of the AI boom, “it’s arguable that memory chips in particular are no longer cyclical and becoming a long-term growth industry instead,” Yardeni said.

Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes believes AI could permanently elevate demand for memory, leading customers to “subscribe” to multiyear commitments like a software business model. As a result, Sandisk’s valuation multiples could double or triple from current levels, Reitzes wrote in a note earlier this week.