For most of the AI boom, investors have focused on the hardware required to train increasingly powerful models. GPUs were the obvious winner. Then came networking, memory, cooling and power infrastructure. But the next phase of AI could create another massive bottleneck that receives considerably less attention: storage.

As AI transitions from training models toward deploying millions of autonomous agents, the amount of data those systems need to access, retrieve, analyze and retain could increase dramatically. That’s where Sandisk $SNDK ( ▼ 3.13% ) enters the picture.

The company is one of the world’s largest producers of NAND flash memory—the technology sitting inside the solid-state drives that increasingly store the enormous datasets used by AI infrastructure. And something particularly interesting is now happening.

Some of Sandisk’s largest customers aren’t simply fulfilling the massive long-term supply agreements they recently signed. They’re already returning to Sandisk asking for more capacity after discovering that their inference workloads may require substantially more storage than originally expected. That could be an early indication that the market is still underestimating how much NAND the agentic AI economy will ultimately consume.

After an extraordinary run in the stock, expectations are clearly much higher than they were several months ago. But the underlying opportunity may also be expanding faster than previously expected. Let’s take a closer look.