Most arguments about the AI cycle get made with leading indicators, and leading indicators are the ones sentiment can fake. Funding rounds price expectations. Model launches announce intent. Backlogs, national accounts, employment statistics and power procurement work differently. They move only after the money has been spent and the contracts have been signed, which makes them the strongest available evidence about where the cycle actually stands. On 11 August the lagging indicators moved, and they moved up.

The arithmetic behind a $4,000 SanDisk share price is unremarkable. Take consensus fiscal 2027 earnings of roughly $168 per share, apply a price-to-earnings multiple of 22, which is about where the S&P 500 sits, and the answer falls out. Evercore’s bull case gets there a different way, assuming better than $300 in earnings power against a headline target of $3,100. Neither calculation requires SanDisk to beat anything. Both require only that the market agree to value NAND flash earnings the way it values the average large-cap American company.

Together AI has closed an $800 million Series C at an $8.3 billion post-money valuation, led by Aramco Ventures with participation from Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, NVIDIA, March Capital, Pegatron, and S Ventures (SentinelOne), among others. The round is one of the largest yet for a company positioned squarely in the open source AI infrastructure layer, and it lands at a moment when the economics of running AI at scale have become a defining concern for anyone building on top of frontier models.