Sandisk spent $4.5 billion on its own stock in the roughly nine weeks between the board’s April 30 authorization and the July 3 fiscal year-end. On August 5 the board added another $14 billion. That leaves $15.5 billion of firepower pointed at a stock trading around $1,600, about a third below the June 25 record close of $2,354.39. The correction took the price down. It didn’t touch the cash.

The $14 billion headline matters less than the $5.035 billion of adjusted free cash flow Sandisk generated in fiscal Q4, of which the $4.5 billion repurchase absorbed 89%. Annualize that quarter and the company throws off more than $20 billion a year. With about 149 million shares outstanding, the market cap sits near $240 billion, so the stock trades at roughly an 8% free cash flow yield on the current run rate. The entire remaining authorization is less than one year of cash at the Q4 pace. At $1,600 it retires about 9.7 million shares, or around 6.5% of the company, and management’s Investor Day framework commits to returning 100% of excess cash from here. This authorization will need topping up again.

I still run about twenty WordPress installs and I have no plans to burn them down. WordPress is competent software. It solved publishing for people who never wanted to open a terminal, it outlasted two decades of fashion, and a big share of the web runs on it for reasons that are not nostalgia. I’ve patched enough of my own installs to know the thing works.

So take this as coming from someone with money on both sides of the table.

The “type a prompt, get a pretty landing page” phase is finished. In 2026 these tools build applications that actually work: authentication, databases, APIs, payments, deployment, usually in a single sitting. That part is genuinely impressive and I’ve stopped being cynical about it.

What I keep running into is the second half. The first version arrives fast. Then you want to change something, and the platforms start behaving very differently from each other. That’s the thing worth judging them on. Not who wins the demo. Who’s still useful on day forty.

The Economist counted about a million American jobs created by AI since 2023, and that count is solid. But look at what those jobs actually are: electricians, HVAC techs, equipment makers, data-centre technicians. People building and running the buildings, not people using the software. Only about one per cent of professional jobs are AI jobs. That matters, because a number like this tracks how much money companies are spending, not how good the technology is. If the models stopped improving tomorrow, hiring would keep going for a year because the contracts are already signed. If the models kept improving but three big spenders cut their budgets, the hiring would stop cold. So the figure is a spending indicator, not proof the technology works. And the people using it to say there’s no problem are missing that the office jobs going quiet and the construction jobs booming are two different labour markets with two different sets of people in them.

Marvell closed Thursday down 1.30% at $241.93 and then surrendered another 7.09% in the aftermarket to $224.34, on a quarter that beat every line management guides to. Revenue of $2.739 billion was a record, up 37% year over year and 13% sequentially, against consensus near $2.71 billion. Non-GAAP EPS of $0.94 cleared $0.93. Data center revenue reached $2.17 billion, 79% of the total, up 46%. The third-quarter guide of $3.15 billion plus or minus 5% sits roughly 4% above the street, and the $1.10 EPS midpoint clears $1.07. Management raised fiscal 2027 revenue by $500 million to approximately $12 billion and fiscal 2028 by $1.5 billion to approximately $18 billion — the second consecutive $1.5 billion raise to the FY28 number in two quarters. None of that is what the print was about.

The memory complex lost several billion dollars of market value on Monday on the strength of a Weibo account. Reports circulating over the weekend, traced back to a pseudonymous poster called Mobile Chip Expert and relayed through Wccftech and AppleInsider, said the Trump administration may permit Apple to source DRAM from ChangXin Memory Technologies and NAND flash from Yangtze Memory Technologies, with a decision communicated after a Trump-Xi meeting expected around September 24. SanDisk traded down as much as 9% to $1,458.29. Micron and Western Digital fell around 7%. Eight days earlier, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had told the Wall Street Journal that it is not great for American companies to be using Chinese memory, and the same names rallied hard on the session. A cabinet secretary on the record moved the group less than an anonymous leaker did. That is worth sitting with before anything else, because it says the complex is currently being priced on the policy narrative rather than on bits.

Monday’s memory tape looked like one trade and was actually two. Kioxia closed up 15.07% at ¥61,840 in Tokyo, inside a Nikkei that gained 0.74% to 69,220.25. CXMT closed up 12% at ¥61.80 in Shanghai, a record, lifting its market capitalisation to ¥4.13 trillion and holding the title of China’s most valuable listed company, which it took from Tencent on Thursday. Nanya extended a month that has now delivered more than 30%. Micron traded up 3% pre-market, SanDisk up 5%, and the SK Hynix ADR up 4%. South Korean markets were shut for a holiday.

The headline numbers were large enough to move a $29 billion company 37% in two sessions. Total revenue of $1.766 billion, up 28% against a $1.66 billion consensus. Adjusted EPS of $1.87 against $1.50. Cloud revenue of $1.213 billion, up 31%, with growth accelerating rather than decaying. GAAP operating income of $211 million against a $28 million loss a year earlier. None of that is the number worth anchoring on.

The progress bar is the least informative part of a firmware update. It moves at a rate that has almost nothing to do with the work being done, it frequently sits at the same percentage for two minutes, and the warning attached to it says not to power off the device without ever explaining what would break if you did. Here is what the sequence actually consists of, and where it can go wrong.

Sandisk closed Wednesday at $1,350.50, down 5.4% on the session, then traded toward $1,257 after the fiscal fourth quarter release put first quarter revenue guidance at $10.3 to $10.8 billion against a consensus near $11.16 billion. The stock is up roughly 490% year to date and has been the best performer in the S&P 500 in 2026. Its fifty-two week range runs from $40.53 to $2,354.39, the high set on June 22, and market capitalization sits near $200 billion on 148.1 million shares outstanding. Beta is 4.13. The target here is $4,000 within twelve months, and the case for it is not an earnings case.