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The S&P 500, despite a rocky start, is going to log another strong year in 2025. The large cap benchmark is up about 17% in 2025 as of December 22, extending the bull market to three years. It follows gains of 24% in 2023 and 23% in 2024.

The list of the top performing stocks on the S&P 500 in 2025 does not include two stocks that have dominated the past two years, Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) and Palantir (Nasdaq: PLTR). However, bit AI-fueled stocks still had strong years, with Nvidia up about 35% year-to-date and Palantir returning roughly 155% YTD.

If the last two years were the years of AI stocks, 2025 seemed to be the year for data storage stocks, with an assist from AI. Here are the top 3 S&P 500 stocks of 2025.

1. Sandisk, up 570%

Sandisk (Nasdaq: SNDK) should be a familiar name to most investors for its USB flash memory drives. The company first went public in 1995, but in 2016 it was bought by Western Digital – another stock that you will see on this list.

Earlier this year, back in February, Western Digital spun off Sandisk and it became a public company, again. It plays in a different part of the market than Western Digital, which is a leader in hard disk drives, whereas Sandisk focuses on solid state drives and flash drives.

Sandisk’s success this year has stemmed mostly from the enterprise flash drives, the high speed memory solid state drives that are used by hyperscalers for data storage and processing.

While Sandisk technically has not been a public company for a full year, going public in February, it has far outperformed every other S&P 500 stock since then, up 570% YTD since the February IPO. It has a reasonable forward P/E ratio of 17 and is considered a consensus buy among analysts with a median price target of $280 per share, suggesting 16% upside.

2. Western Digital, up 292%

The aforementioned Western Digital (Nasdaq: WDC), which spun off Sandisk earlier this year, is the second best performer on the S&P 500 in 2025.

Western Digital stock has returned 292% year-to-date, driven by the same factors as Sandisk – the emergence of AI and the need for data storage.

As mentioned, Western Digital does not directly compete with Sandisk as it is a provider of hard disk drives, the much larger capacity storage drives that are used in high speed data centers. Western Digital dominates in this market, along with Seagate Technology (Nasdaq: STX), as the two basically own about 80% of the market.

Western Digital is also considered a consensus buy among analysts, but its median price target is just $182 per share, suggesting 3% upside. But it is also reasonably valued with a P/E of 24.

It should be noted that Seagate is also in the top 5, with a YTD return of 227%.

3. Micron Technology, up 228%

The third best performing stock on the S&P 500 in 2025 is Micron Technology (Nasdaq: MU), which is also in the realm of data storage. Micron, which makes high bandwidth memory and storage chips, has returned about 228% in 2025.

Micron has long been a favorite stock, and one we called out last year as a stock to watch. Fueled by the need for AI computing, Micron stock has flourished as a provider of memory chips for hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. In the most recent quarter, its net income jumped 175% year-over-year while revenue soared 56%.

Its outlook calls for more of the same, making Micron still a good buy. Incredibly, the stock is still trading it at just 10 times forward earnings, which makes it a great value for the money. Analysts have set a median price target of $305 per share, which suggests 10% upside in 2026.

Rounding out the top five for 2025 are two stocks that fall right behind Micron. One is Seagate, which we already mentioned, followed by Robinhood (Nasdaq: HOOD), both of which returned around 227%.

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