After the algorithm impact wave, there are now storage "golden pits." Bernstein: Seagate (STX.US), Western Digital Corporation (WDC.US), and others are welcoming buying opportunities.

Since Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US) announced its TurboQuant algorithm on March 24, the storage and memory class stocks have generally declined under pressure. However, analysts at Bernstein, a institution under the French Industrial Bank, believe that the emergence of this algorithm has no impact on HDD (hard disk drive) demand and only a minimal impact on NAND flash. The recent overall selling pressure has actually created a more attractive entry point for stocks such as Seagate Technology Holdings PLC (STX.US), SanDisk (SNDK.US), and Western Digital Corporation (WDC.US). Based on this, Bernstein has upgraded its rating on Western Digital Corporation from "neutral" to "outperform the market", substantially raising its target price from $170 to $340. The institution has also reiterated its "outperform the market" rating on Seagate Technology Holdings PLC and raised its target price from $500 to $620; and for SanDisk, they maintain an "outperform the market" rating with a target price of $1000. The TurboQuant technology can reduce KV cache memory occupancy six times and achieve up to eight times higher inference performance on NVIDIA Corporation's H100 GPU, without sacrificing accuracy. This technology is not used for AI model training. In an investor report released on Tuesday by the Bernstein analyst team led by Mark Newman, they stated, "This technology does not compress model weights, training data, or any static data. Therefore, its potential impact is mainly focused on GPU's HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) or system DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory), with only an indirect impact on NAND flash, which is primarily used for unloading data in cold cache. Demand for HDD is completely zero." Recently, the stock prices of Western Digital Corporation, Seagate Technology Holdings PLC, and SanDisk have each declined by 21%, 17%, and 26% respectively from recent highs, with most of the decline occurring after the announcement of the TurboQuant news. Newman further pointed out, "Factors such as AI workloads, rich media content creation, extended data retention periods, and increasingly stringent data sovereignty standards are driving demand growth and the rise in average selling prices (ASP). The recovery in NAND flash prices also provides more support for HDD ASP. We currently expect the total revenue of Western Digital Corporation and Seagate Technology Holdings PLC to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24% between the fiscal years 2025 and 2030. This growth is driven by a 24% increase in bit shipments and stable ASP. This is a significant improvement over our previous model assumption of 18.7% bit shipment growth and a 3.6% ASP decline."