SanDisk Corp at Mizuho Technology Conference Summary

The following is excerpted from the question-and-answer section of the transcript.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Absolutely. Thanks for that, David. I'll start off. At the Analyst Day when we met, I know one of the things you said is the reason you when came to Sandisk is there's a lot of things happening in NAND, it's much more interesting, and you see a lot of changes coming to NAND. So I was wondering if we can start right there, maybe give us a big picture overview of what you see as some of the big structural changes happening in the NAND industry. What are the drivers there? How do you see those kind of playing out.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Got it. Absolutely. I'm sure we'll talk a lot about all that. But I just want to take one -- a little bit deeper dive into what's happening on the AI server side. Obviously, that's a huge market on the data center side, as you mentioned. You are seeing increasing storage demand for LLMs, larger inference workloads. And one of the things that you talked about at your Analyst Day was this high bandwidth -- concept of high-bandwidth flash and how that is kind of augmenting the HBM memory road map. Maybe you can talk to what's happening there, how that -- how you see that roadmap evolving? You talked about massive capacities like 4,000 gig of high-bandwidth flash versus, you know, today, we put somewhere like 192 gig of HBM DRAM. So maybe you can talk to how you see that evolving. And obviously, those can support massive LLM models on them.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Fantastic. It's interesting you mentioned Stargate because we got Rene -- CEO Rene from ARM presenting right after this. And we had OpenAI yesterday. So --

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Okay. Fantastic. Are you seeing interest from the CSPs in this massive terabyte storage to kind of have access -- much higher access speeds, I would think, on a SSD versus --

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Got it. I think the -- what you traditionally see or conventionally see on SSDs is a much higher read speed, but a much slower write speed. And even as you see some of the CSPs like Meta come out and say, hey, we want to put QLC SSDs, what -- the pushback you hear from investors is -- or even for the hard disk drive guys -- is, hey, they don't have the read speed, and the write speed is much slower in SSD. So you won't see that adoption picking up. What's your pushback to that?

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Got it. No, that's interesting because I think some of your high-end 128-terabyte SSDs, they have pretty significant read speed, like 14,500 megabits per second. So that's a very high read speed on there.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Absolutely. The high-bandwidth flash is something almost seems disruptive in the industrial --

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : So to that point, what I take is, as you look out, what you're seeing is supply slowing down and might be -- because the cost downs are also slowing down, but that improves the profitability of the industry. And there is obviously a drive to increase capacity on some of these storage drives. And that also helps you on the demand side.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : I stopped counting.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Got it. Very helpful. I just want to hit on one other new product that you guys talked about, which is -- I wouldn't say a new product -- but just 3D matrix memory, I guess.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : It obviously drives significant capacity expansion versus DRAM at much lower cost. So it's hitting all the right -- checking off all the right boxes, I guess. But can you talk to how that's -- what -- how you intend to bring that to market? What's the -- what's the value proposition on 3D matrix versus what do you do today on conventional NAND?

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : The founders of NAND.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Memory lake, yeah.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Yeah. When do you expect to see some of these technologies hit the market whether it's flash or --

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : We had to go there.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Okay. Got it. So obviously, you guys are very well represented on the consumer side and the mobile side. And I'll make this last question, and we'll take some from the audience. But data center is where you are slightly underrepresented, I would say. And I think you guys have mentioned it's almost 1 zettabyte -- exabyte market today. And 30% of that is data center. How -- what's the road map to kind of get to -- get fully represented in that market, I guess?

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Great. I think that brings us to the top of the hour. But we'll take some questions if there are any questions in the audience? Okay.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Yeah. Thank you.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Really appreciate the time.

Question: Vijay Rakesh - Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd - Analyst : Yeah.