Three of the highest-ranked Wall Street analyst picks this week share a common thread: each company sits directly in the path of AI-driven demand, and each has a catalyst the market has not fully priced. CrowdStrike, Dell Technologies, and SanDisk earned buy ratings or price-target upgrades from analysts ranked in the top 0.2% of more than 12,400 professionals tracked by TipRanks.
CrowdStrike Delivers, Then Beats Expectations
Truist analyst Junaid Siddiqui had already raised his price target on CrowdStrike (CRWD) to $245 from $187.50 ahead of the company’s fiscal second-quarter results, citing Falcon Flex momentum and healthy large-deal pipelines. The numbers that followed gave him little reason to revise that view.
CrowdStrike’s Q2 fiscal year 2027 results, covering the period ended 31 July 2026, showed total revenue of $1.47 billion, up 26% year-on-year, with subscription revenue of $1.40 billion growing at 27%. Annual Recurring Revenue reached $5.84 billion, a 25% increase, with net new ARR of $332.8 million added in the quarter alone. Operating cash flow climbed to $530.3 million from $332.8 million a year earlier, and free cash flow rose to $377.4 million. The company held $5.01 billion in cash and equivalents at quarter-end.
The bottom line swung to a net profit of $5.3 million, or 1 cent per share, against a net loss of $70.2 million a year ago. Adjusted earnings of 31 cents per share beat consensus by 2 cents, according to CNBC, and chief executive George Kurtz described it as ‘the best quarter in CrowdStrike’s history.’ Shares jumped more than 11% in extended trading to around $206.65.
Among Falcon Flex customers who have re-flexed at least twice, average ending ARR was 53% higher than their initial Flex starting point, a figure that rose for the second consecutive quarter, per MarketBeat citing the earnings call. Siddiqui, ranked No. 226 on TipRanks with an 80% profitable-rating record and an average return of around 40%, views platform consolidation and AI-led demand as the central question for the stock going forward.
‘We continue to view CrowdStrike as one of the primary beneficiaries of platform consolidation, though we expect investors to remain focused on competitive dynamics and whether current growth levels represent a new baseline or a period of demand acceleration,’ Siddiqui said.
Dell’s Storage Business: The Margin Story Hiding Behind the AI Server Headlines
Evercore analyst Amit Daryanani, ranked No. 19 on TipRanks with a 71% success rate and average returns of 38.70%, raised his price target on Dell Technologies (DELL) to $550 from $500. His thesis is straightforward: the AI server orders are the headline, but the storage division is where margin expansion lives.
Dell’s Q1 fiscal 2027 SEC filing, for the period ended 1 May 2026, shows just how extreme the AI server build-out has become. AI-optimised server revenue hit $16.132 billion in the quarter, up 757% from $1.882 billion a year earlier. Total Infrastructure Solutions Group revenue reached $29.009 billion, up 181%. Chief operating officer Jeff Clarke disclosed $24.4 billion in AI orders booked in Q1 alone and raised the full-year AI server revenue target to $60 billion. Total company net revenue was $43.842 billion, up 88% year-on-year.
Against that backdrop, storage revenue of $4.334 billion, up 8% from $3.996 billion, looks modest. Daryanani’s point is that it shouldn’t be ignored. Storage accounts for an estimated 10% of FY27 revenue but carries operating margins in the low-20% range, against mid-single-digit margins on AI servers and mid-teens on traditional servers. As enterprises begin pulling workloads back on-premises, Daryanani expects storage demand to accelerate.
‘We think DELL’s storage business is becoming increasingly strategic as AI infrastructure deployments move beyond GPU procurement and toward full stack and AI-ready architectures,’ Daryanani said.
Wall Street Analyst Picks Spotlight SanDisk’s $93.9 Billion Backlog
J.P. Morgan analyst Harlan Sur resumed coverage of SanDisk (SNDK) with a buy rating and a price target of $2,250 following the company’s 2026 Investor Day, held on 13 August 2026 in New York. Sur ranks No. 15 on TipRanks, with a 71% success rate and average returns of 43.20%.
The structural underpinning is SanDisk’s New Business Model framework: eight signed long-term agreements with a total contract value of $93.9 billion, of which $91.1 billion remains as performance obligations still to be recognised as revenue. Those contracts carry gross margins of around 80% even at floor pricing, and $16.5 billion in financial guarantees from third-party institutions and customer deposits protect SanDisk if a buyer exits mid-contract, according to analysis published by TIKR.
Three of the eight NBM customers are US hyperscalers, with average contract lengths exceeding four years and the longest at five, per Yahoo Finance citing management comments at the Investor Day. NBMs are expected to cover roughly half of FY2027 bit shipments and about two-thirds in FY2028, progressively locking in the margin profile. SanDisk’s long-term financial model targets non-GAAP gross margins of approximately 80%, operating margins near 75%, and an adjusted free cash flow margin of around 50%.
Sur’s technology argument centres on SanDisk’s BiCS10 process, which is sampling ahead of schedule and delivers 65% more bits per wafer than BiCS8. For AI inference specifically, Sur expects High Bandwidth Flash to emerge as a differentiated memory platform. Meta has joined the consortium developing the open standard for High Bandwidth Flash, adding weight to that thesis.
For the stock itself, the clearest near-term trigger is whether hyperscaler NBM adoption broadens beyond the current three US customers. A fourth signed agreement would signal that the $93.9 billion backlog is a floor rather than a ceiling.
