Micron, Sandisk and Western Digital Slide About 7% as Election and Memory-Demand Worries Hit Storage Stocks

Memory and storage stocks sold off on Wednesday while the broader market rallied. Per SentiSense price data, Micron (MU) closed down 7.0% at $795.23, Sandisk (SNDK) fell 7.9% to $1,037.40 and Western Digital (WDC) dropped 6.8% to $323.83. Seagate (STX) lost 8.13%, according to 24/7 Wall St., which said Micron's drop was its largest one-day percentage decline since Aug. 18, on a day the Nasdaq Composite gained 1.44%.

Publishers pointed to three overlapping worries rather than one cause. The election raised concerns about AI infrastructure spending, "including fears that the Texas governor's race could lead to a data center moratorium in that state". There were also signs that rising memory prices are hitting some areas of the hardware market, and Kioxia, Sandisk's manufacturing joint venture partner, issued a conservative December-quarter forecast on Nov. 2. Sandisk had separately drawn a Fox Advisors downgrade to equal weight and a Wells Fargo price-target cut around the election. The worry is memory prices running high enough to hurt demand, not prices falling.

The selling continued after hours. Micron and Sandisk slipped about 2.5% overnight after Qualcomm fell about 9% on its own results, feeding concern that costlier memory makes phones more expensive to build. The context matters: even after the slide, Sandisk is still up 353% this year, so holders had large gains to protect.

The bull case has not gone away. The Motley Fool noted Citigroup's forecast of continued memory undersupply in 2027, with production growing 22% against demand growth of 26%, and TipRanks said the average analyst target for Micron sits about 104% above Wednesday's close. A Seeking Alpha contributor argues Sandisk looks cheap at a forward PEG of 0.12x, though that figure depends heavily on the growth estimate used. Points to watch are memory contract pricing, any Texas data center policy moves, and whether device makers push back on higher memory costs.