SanDisk manufactures NAND flash memory used in consumer and enterprise storage products, including solid-state drives for data centers, consumer USB and memory cards, and embedded storage for mobile devices. The company was spun off from Western Digital in 2024 and relisted as an independent public company focused solely on flash storage. SanDisk operates manufacturing facilities jointly with Kioxia in Japan, sharing technology development and production capacity while marketing products independently.

AI training workloads have created a significant demand signal for high-throughput NAND storage. Training large language models requires reading enormous datasets repeatedly across a training run, as well as writing frequent model checkpoints to storage. These access patterns favor high sequential read bandwidth and large storage capacity, where modern QLC NAND excels on a cost-per-gigabyte basis. As the scale of AI training datasets and models has grown, the storage provisioned per GPU cluster has grown alongside it.

SanDisk is launching QLC and ULC (ultra-level cell) NAND products optimized for AI training data pipeline workloads, targeting the sequential read throughput and capacity requirements of large-scale AI infrastructure. As an independent company, SanDisk has more flexibility to focus its product roadmap and go-to-market on the enterprise and hyperscaler segments where AI storage demand is concentrated.