Intel, Sandisk lead chip rebound as 3 stocks surge over 250% YTD

Intel, Sandisk, and Western Digital are powering a chip-sector rally ahead of earnings season, with all three up more than 250 percent year to date.

Intel's rally is pulling the semiconductor sector higher as the three best-performing S&P 500 stocks this year — Intel, Sandisk, and Western Digital — extend gains ahead of earnings season.

"Memory stocks are in a rotation, not a fundamental breakdown of the super-cycle," analysts at Morgan Stanley wrote, maintaining overweight ratings on Micron and SanDisk. The firm views the recent pullback in memory names as profit-taking after parabolic runs, not a shift in fundamentals.

SanDisk has surged 713 percent year to date, while Intel and Western Digital have each gained more than 250 percent, making them the top three performers in the S&P 500. Western Digital's February 2025 divestiture of its remaining SanDisk stake has insulated it from NAND pricing volatility, allowing the hard-disk-drive company to capture capital rotating out of pure memory plays. Micron, which reported a blowout fiscal third quarter on June 24 with revenue of $41.46 billion — an 18 percent beat — has seen its stock pull back 5 percent in a sell-the-news move, according to market data.

The coordinated advance shows that investors expect AI-driven demand for memory and processing chips to sustain through the second half. Intel's foundry roadmap and data center segment will be in focus when it reports next month, while Sandisk and Western Digital face questions about NAND pricing after a 713 percent rally. If the momentum holds, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index could attract additional inflows, reinforcing the sector's leadership in the broader market.

Memory vs. Storage — A Structural Divergence

The rally masks a growing divergence between memory and storage businesses. SanDisk and Micron, both pure NAND and DRAM plays, have benefited from AI's demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a type of advanced memory that links GPUs to data. Western Digital, now a pure hard-disk-drive company after the SanDisk split, offers a different exposure: HDD demand from cloud data centers expanding capacity for AI training and inference workloads.

What Earnings Season Will Reveal

Intel's upcoming report will be the first major test of whether the chip-sector recovery has legs. Analysts will scrutinize data center revenue, which competes directly with Nvidia and AMD in the AI accelerator market, and foundry margins, a key metric for Intel's turnaround strategy. For Sandisk and Western Digital, the focus will be on NAND pricing trends and whether enterprise demand can sustain the current valuation multiples.

Intel trades at roughly 22 times forward earnings, a discount to Nvidia's 35 times, reflecting skepticism about its foundry ambitions. SanDisk's 713 percent gain has pushed its valuation to levels that assume continued NAND tightness through 2027. If earnings confirm the demand thesis, the three stocks could extend their lead; if not, the rotation out of memory names that Morgan Stanley flagged could accelerate.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.