Goldman names 3 names to benefit as high-performance NAND tackles AI’s memory wall

Investing.com -- Goldman Sachs named the stocks it sees as the likely beneficiaries of emerging high-performance memory chips designed to ease a growing bottleneck in AI inference, in a note on Monday.

SanDisk, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics are the stocks in question.

Analyst James Schneider said solutions such as High-Bandwidth Flash, or HBF, are promising tools to address a worsening memory constraint.

He sees a potential market of roughly $40 billion to $150 billion by 2030, depending on whether adoption across AI chips reaches 15% or 50%.

Schneider said HBF can meaningfully reduce inference costs by increasing AI chip utilization. He estimates it could lower the overall cost of inference throughput by about 30%, translating into as much as several hundred billion dollars in capital spending savings for cloud providers.

In a bull case assuming rapid adoption on half of AI chips by late 2028, Goldman believes HBF would account for about 4% of global NAND bit shipments but roughly 9% of wafer capacity, because of larger die sizes. Schneider compared that dynamic to high-bandwidth memory within the DRAM market.

He cautioned that these technologies remain in early development at a system level, with a wide range of possible outcomes, while he also flagged Kioxia's XL-Flash and Samsung's zNAND-O as alternative approaches.

The bank favors SanDisk, which it rates Buy, and SK Hynix for their technology leadership in HBF. It also rates Samsung a Buy, citing its strong NAND portfolio.

Micron is rated Neutral, with Schneider saying it is less of a direct beneficiary given its focus on DRAM.