Western Digital runs out of HDD capacity: CEO says massive AI deals secured, price surges ahead

Western Digital has said that it has run out of HDD capacity, while its consumer share has dropped to just 5% as enterprise and AI eats up storage as if it were oxygen in a tiny room.

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We all know about the insane AI demand that has been eating up all of the DRAM supply, but we've been warned for months that mechanical HDDs would be affected... where we wrote a story just a few months ago that HDD prices surged to their highest point in 2 years with demand coming out of the US and China alone.

WD CEO Irving Tan said during the Q2 earnings call: "As we highlighted, we're pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers. And we've also established LTAs with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028. Obviously, these LTAs have a combination of volume of exabytes and price".

Western Digital's VP of Investor Relations said that the company's cloud revenue accounted for 89% of total revenue, and its consumer revenue accounted for a measly 5%. AI needs data and it needs a LOT of it, with cloud service providers all using HDDs which are more cost-effective and more efficient storage medium than SSD.

The data scales into the exabytes and beyond for data centers, with scraped web data, processed data backups, inference logs, and so, so much more. WD running out of HDD capacity is just nuts.