🦖 From dinosaur to hottest AI trade

Pretty much nobody saw it coming.

Five months and nearly a 1,000% return later, it’s one of the craziest comeback stories on Wall Street, with Sandisk, a stodgy old memory card company, vaulting to the top of the S&P 500 and squarely into the center of the AI trade.

Last August, memory chip analysts, vendors, researchers, and consultants gathered in Santa Clara, California, for their big annual conference. Mark Webb, a 20-year veteran of Intel, said most at the event had a similar outlook: things would likely slow down in the winter, then there’d be a return to growth in 2026.

“I don’t think there was any disagreement,” Webb recalled. “Then in September, everything started skyrocketing.”

• The subsequent run on chips put Sandisk — a company you might remember from the early 2000s as a maker of things like USB thumb drives and memory cards — at the heart of the hottest trade on Wall Street. 

• In recent months, rising AI usage by companies and consumers has generated so much data, it’s prompted a rapid market reassessment of the amount of memory chips and storage devices needed to manage it.

• The result: market momentum is now centering on makers of memory chips, such as Micron, and data storage products that use those chips, like Sandisk. 

• As one insider put it: “I would say memory is the future of AI, because if there is no memory, there’s no AI.” 

• And heavyweights like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang agree, noting that current memory solutions are “the bottleneck” of AI. 

Even as memory-related stocks worldwide spiked, Sandisk was an outlier, as you can see in this chart. Analysts say there are a couple reasons for Sandisk’s outperformance, including its built-in cost advantage. 

The Takeaway

Industry insiders didn’t expect it. One of the smartest hedge funds on Wall Street didn’t see it coming. Even Sandisk itself, which has existed as a stand-alone stock for less than a year, seemed surprised.

The company’s January 29 earnings report will be a key event for traders, and analysts have penciled in some lofty expectations for the hottest stock of 2025 to live up to in 2026. Whatever the results, Sandisk certainly is having a memorable first year on the market.

Read more

This week Amazon received approval to build a hybrid big-box store and fulfillment center outside Chicago that’s roughly twice the size of a typical Target. Why would the e-commerce giant want to wade into the costly and cumbersome business of physical stores, especially after earlier brick-and-mortar iterations like Amazon Go have failed?

There are at least two reasons:

• First, despite e-commerce’s rapid growth, the vast majority of retail purchases still happen in physical stores, according to Census Bureau data.

• Second, Amazon’s own customers regularly shop at competing big-box retailers — Consumer Intelligence Research Partners found that 93% have also shopped at Walmart. And as Amazon pushes further into groceries, a category still dominated by in-person shopping, CIRP estimates that basically all Amazon customers buy their groceries elsewhere.

See the charts here.

The Takeaway

Looking at the charts, it’s not hard to understand Amazon’s decision. To focus in on groceries, last year, Amazon launched a new private-label brand and pushed into same-day deliveries, ending 2025 with more than 2,300 locations offering fast Prime delivery of perishable groceries, which analysts loved. If the company can also take a bite of the big-box pie, it could be another huge win. 

Read more

See for yourself just how massive Meta’s Hyperion data center is

It’s no wonder communities are pushing back on data center build-outs once you get a sense of the actual scale of the massive constructions, which is actually quite hard to do as most are surrounded by featureless farmland.

So we built an interactive map that lets you teleport the nearly 5-mile-long, 1-mile-wide Hyperion tract to some recognizable spots, like Manhattan, Washington, DC, London… or on top of your local town.

Put in your address

• 🌀 Weather: The East Coast is in for some snow this weekend, according to forecasts from the National Weather Service, but just how much is an open question. Markets* are pricing in the total January snowfall for New York City at a 92% chance of coming in above 6 inches, a 78% chance above 10 inches, a 63% chance above 15 inches, and even a 32% chance of more than 20 inches of snow in the Big Apple. 

• 🏆 Oscars: The Oscar nominations will be announced this morning at 8:30 a.m. ET. One category to keep an eye on is Best Actor, where Timothée Chalamet is going into nomination day with a 75% chance of winning Oscar gold but is against serious competition in the form of Leonardo DiCaprio, Wagner Moura, and Michael B. Jordan. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

• After slumping sales, Ikea is more than doubling its investment in India over the next five years

• OpenAI is rolling out a new “age prediction” feature for ChatGPT — hopefully it does a better job than Spotify Wrapped

• Netflix made $1.5 billion from advertising last year, but it’s just a drop in the ocean in the media behemoth’s business

• BlackRock singled out ethereum as the primary “beneficiary of growth” for tokenization