SAN JOSE, Calif. — Shares of SanDisk Corp. fell 5.18% to $1,544.98 in Monday trading, down $84.59, as a fresh wave of concern over the pace of artificial intelligence development combined with lingering questions about a Chinese AI model's dramatically reduced memory requirements to pressure NAND flash and memory chip stocks across the board.

The decline, which briefly pushed shares down as much as 6% in premarket trading before paring slightly at the open, extended a broader pullback for storage and memory names Monday. Micron Technology fell roughly 5%, while Western Digital and Seagate Technology each dropped more than 4%. South Korea's SK Hynix fell more than 7% in its own session. The sector-wide weakness came as investors weighed calls from prominent AI executives to slow the pace of frontier model development against a separate, more technical concern specific to memory chipmakers: whether the assumptions underpinning the sector's explosive rally may be overstated.

That second concern traces back to DeepSeek, the Chinese AI developer, which released an updated version of its cost-optimized Flash model on September 10. The new model, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, introduced architectural changes that dramatically reduce the amount of memory needed to run AI inference workloads, cutting the model's key-value cache consumption, a core driver of memory demand during AI processing, to between roughly 13% and 25% of its predecessor's requirements. In practical terms, the redesign allows the model to support four to eight times as many simultaneous users within the same memory footprint, according to DeepSeek's own technical........

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