SanDisk (SNDK): From Bits to High Bandwidth Flash

Overnight Studios — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:29:10 -0400

It's 1988, and a physicist named Eli Harari walks out of a Silicon Valley chip company that doesn't believe in his idea: that a chip — not a spinning disk, not film — should be where the world stores its data. The next morning, he starts SunDisk. Today that company is worth two hundred and thirty billion dollars — and it just did something no memory maker has ever pulled off: it got the world's biggest buyers to sign guaranteed minimum purchases worth $93.9 billion, backed by $16.5 billion in posted collateral, for a product that has crashed on schedule every cycle since the eighties.

In our first episode, Thomas and Katie tell the whole SanDisk story: the floating-gate breakthrough at Hughes Aircraft, the invention of the memory card, the Toshiba partnership that survived an accounting scandal, a nuclear bankruptcy, and a courtroom gavel — and then the question that decides everything from here: did SanDisk re-engineer the memory cycle, or just get the top of one signed in ink?

Along the way: why AI suddenly eats flash memory, how a commodity manufacturer prints an 84.6% gross margin, what a contract "floor" is actually worth when winter arrives — and the five gauges we'll be watching, on air, to settle it.

Chapters
0:00 — Intro
0:11 — The Setup
2:52 — History of the Business & Founding
15:11 — The Technology Today
22:30 — Financials & Valuation
33:27 — Emerging Technologies
39:15 — What to Watch
44:38 — The Political Shot Clock
47:43 — Outro

Sources beyond the report: Eli Harari — Computer History Museum oral history · Sanjay Mehrotra — TechSurge and Bloomberg Talks · research call-outs from J.P. Morgan (Harlan Sur) and Wells Fargo (Aaron Rakers)

Second Spark is produced by Overnight Studios. This show is for information and entertainment only. Nothing you hear is investment advice, and the people behind the show may hold positions in the companies we cover.