This Stock Has Had the Best 2026 In the S&P 500. It Just Got Another Boost.

The hottest tech stock in the S&P 500 this year got even hotter today, marking continued enthusiasm for a pocket of the AI trade even as U.S. markets sputtered to start the trading week.

Shares of Sandisk (SNDK) hit a new intraday record high on Tuesday, pushing its year-to-date returns to about 90%—outperforming the so-called Magnificent 7, as well as the broader market, by a wide margin. Today's rise: nearly 10%, best in the S&P 500, on a day when markets broadly, including tech shares, retreated amid trade and geopolitical uncertainty and a move toward haven assets.

The lift came after Citi boosted its earnings estimates and target prices for Sandisk, as well as other data storage stocks that have been on a tear lately. They remain key beneficiaries, the analysts wrote, of "solid hyperscaler demand supporting higher pricing" for memory, the bank's research analysts said in a 2026 outlook report for tech hardware companies published yesterday.

Citi analysts including Asiya Merchant said that Sandisk "sounded the most constructive" among the companies it hosted at company meetings at CES 2026 earlier this month on NAND (a type of flash memory) industry fundamentals. Sandisk told Citi there was upside in demand associated with data centers, including from Nvidia's (NVDA) just-launched Vera Rubin AI computing platform. That would more than offset any impact to its business from lower demand related to PCs or smartphones, according to the Citi report.

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Supply and demand dynamics favor data storage companies as supply for NAND is expected to be undersupplied through next year, while demand is set to rise over the same period as AI workloads expand.

That said, bank analysts said other data storage companies such as Seagate Technology (STX) and Western Digital (WDC) were also beneficiaries of strong storage demand. Shares of both companies are up this year, too, though nowhere near as much as those of SanDisk.

Citi maintained its bullish stance, or Buy rating, on the stock, and raised its 2026 earnings-per-share estimate to $17.78 from $13.96. It also boosted its price target to $490 from $280, well above Visible Alpha's bearish mean near $311. Shares closed at around $453 on Tuesday, implying upside of about 8%.