Western Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: WDC) today reported fiscal first quarter 2027 financial results for the period ended October 2, 2026.

Irving Tan, CEO of WD"Fiscal 2027 is off to a strong start, with results exceeding expectations, driven by robust customer demand and disciplined execution. In our fiscal first quarter, revenue grew 55% year over year, non-GAAP gross and operating margins expanded to 58.1% and 49.1%, respectively, resulting in a 161% year-over-year increase in non-GAAP EPS. Reflecting our confidence in the business and our commitment to return capital to shareholders, we are raising our quarterly cash dividend by 17% to $0.175 per share. We are executing well through our technology transitions to meet the growing demand for storage. As we deepen our customer relationships, broaden the customer base to new areas of the market, and extend our visibility into future demand, we are building an increasingly durable foundation for long-term value creation."

Western Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: WDC) today reported fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal year 2026 financial results for the period ended July 3, 2026.

"WD concluded fiscal year 2026 with strong performance. In our fiscal fourth quarter, revenue increased 44% year over year, gross and operating margins expanded, and earnings per share more than doubled. These results reflect our ability to scale innovation and operational excellence across our global organization, supporting our customers' growing storage demand," said Irving Tan, CEO of WD. "As global data creation continues to accelerate, we enter fiscal year 2027 with continued confidence in the durability of demand and with increasing visibility into our business. With our scale, technology leadership, and operational discipline, WD is well positioned to capitalize on the secular data growth opportunity and deliver long-term shareholder value."

Sandisk today introduced the Optimus GX PRO 850P, an M.2 NVMe Gen 4 SSD tailor-made for the Sony PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro consoles. The drive is an officially-licensed PlayStation accessory, and comes with performance and thermal optimization for the consoles. It comes in capacity variants of up to 8 TB. The drive is a variant of the Optimus GX PRO 850X that Sandisk targets at PC gamers and enthusiasts.

Given the way Sandisk is differentiating the 850P from the 850X, this new drive might have a different performance profile from its PC-targeted sibling, and perhaps even a different combination of controller and NAND flash. The company hasn't put out a detailed specs sheet, yet. We know that the 850X comes with WDC's in-house Black G2 PCIe Gen 4, 8-channel controller that uses a DRAM cache, paired with Kioxia 112-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. The company also hasn't put out pricing. For reference, the top 8 TB 850X is going for an eye-watering $2,700.

Western Digital showcased its refreshed G-DRIVE professional external storage lineup at Computex 2026 following its relaunch back in February as a unified brand. The lineup spans portable to rackmount-style storage solutions. At the top of the lineup sits the G-DRIVE 8 supporting up to 224 TB of capacity and featuring eight-bay hardware RAID. The WD G-DRIVE 4 is a four-bay model offering up to 80 TB of storage. Both models feature hardware RAID and Thunderbolt 5, daisy-chaining for up to six devices and an e-ink display. Western Digital plans for a release in early 2027.

The G-DRIVE 2 has a dual-bay configuration with storage capacity up to 56 TB. It also kept the Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, six-device daisy-chaining and the integrated e-ink display. It is expected in early 2027.

Having offloaded its entire consumer flash storage business to Sandisk brand, Western Digital is focusing on the Ultrastar brand of enterprise hard drives, and the G-Drive brand of professional storage solutions. During the exhibition in Taipei, the company highlighted how continuous AI workloads ,ranging from initial training models to active agentic systems, generate massive, compounding volumes of data. WD asserts that managing this exponential data growth while maintaining economic efficiency is the defining challenge for enterprise and cloud computing environments. By treating AI primarily as a data system rather than merely a compute system, the company aims to provide the foundational storage necessary for long-term operational viability.

Central to Western Digital's showcase are several significant advancements in traditional mechanical storage. The company demonstrated its comprehensive Ultrastar hard drive portfolio, which utilizes recording technologies such as UltraSMR, ePMR, and HAMR to achieve massive capacities. To integrate these advanced drives into functional enterprise environments, the company expanded its platform solutions with the introduction of the Ultrastar Data 3000 series JBODs. These scalable enclosures feature twelve ports of 24 Gb/s SAS-4 host connectivity to accommodate increasing bandwidth demands. The 3000 series implements specialized physical engineering, including ArcticFlow multizone cooling and IsoVibe vibration isolation technologies. Western Digital states that these environmental controls can reduce drive return rates by up to sixty-two percent, ensuring dependable operation in high-density deployments.

Western Digital Corporation, the storage foundation of the AI-driven data economy, today announced a significant step in next-generation infrastructure security with the integration of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) into its newest high-capacity Ultrastar UltraSMR hard disk drives. As AI infrastructure evolves from compute-centric deployments to data systems that persistently retain information across every inference, training run, and interaction, the durability and security of that data becomes foundational, not optional. These drives are currently in qualification with multiple hyperscale customers, reflecting strong early interest in quantum-resilient storage architectures.

AI data systems generate and retain massive, long-lived data sets. Securing that data over decades, not just years, must be a core requirement of modern infrastructure. WD's launch of the first hard drives to implement NIST-approved quantum-resistant algorithms marks a definitive industry transition—from theoretical planning to deployed hardware-level defense. By hardening the root of trust, WD provides a critical safeguard against threats like harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL) and similar attacks. This helps protect the massive data lakes fueling today's AI innovations against the cryptographic protection-breaking power of tomorrow's quantum computers. WD is among the first to bring post-quantum cryptography into production storage infrastructure, helping lead the industry's quantum transition with deployed, standards-aligned, infrastructure-level protection, setting a new baseline for trust in AI-era data systems.

Western Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: WDC) today reported fiscal third quarter 2026 financial results for the period ended April 3, 2026.

"WD started calendar year 2026 with great execution, driving strong sequential and year-over-year revenue growth in all our end markets, while expanding gross and operating margins. Gross margin exceeded 50%, reflecting our continued delivery of innovation across an expanding set of customers. Given our confidence in the durability of our business, we are also announcing a 20% increase in the quarterly cash dividend on the company's common stock to $0.15 per share," said Irving Tan, CEO of WD. "The demand drivers are clear: Virtually every AI workload, from training, inference, agentic AI to physical AI, creates data that is stored persistently and cost-efficiently on HDDs."

JetStor today announced the successful deployment of an 80 PB high-density archive for a government agency - one of its largest on-premises archive deployments of its kind in the public sector. Designed to meet rigorous security demands for long-term data retention, JetStor's POD-based architecture was paired with WD Ultrastar 26 TB enterprise-class hard drives to deliver a secure, high-density cost-efficient storage foundation built for long-term data retention at scale.

Public-sector IT teams face a distinct challenge at this scale: growing storage capacity economically without disrupting active production networks or retraining operations staff. JetStor addressed this by standardizing the entire deployment into repeatable POD building blocks—each anchored by WD Ultrastar DC HC590 26 TB SAS 7200RPM drives—across 132 JetStor XS3324D 4U 24-bay systems and 3,200 drives total. The result is a dual Fibre Channel fabric architecture that supports seamless expansion while keeping infrastructure management straightforward and predictable from day one.

WD (Nasdaq: WDC) today announced the re-launch of its G-DRIVE brand as the unified identity for its content creator and creative professional external storage product portfolio. The brand consolidation brings together high-capacity, high-performance storage solutions under a single name brand - G-DRIVE - known for its quality, performance, and reliability.

The G-DRIVE brand, also represented by the iconic "G" logo, will replace Sandisk Professional branding across WD's creator storage lineup, including desktop drives, portable drives and multi-bay RAID systems purpose-built for the creative community's most demanding workflows: high-resolution photography, video production, graphic design, and audio engineering. Supporting individuals, businesses and production studios, G-DRIVE solutions support the full creative lifecycle, from on-set capture and real-time editing to backup and post-production. Products currently branded as Sandisk Professional will transition to the G-DRIVE brand by the end of this month.

At its Innovation Day 2026, Western Digital today unveiled a new customer-centric storage roadmap that reinvents the hard drive for AI needs, reinforcing its position as a strategic storage infrastructure partner for the AI-driven data economy. The announcements reflect how WD's fundamental business transformation has enabled a new generation of storage technologies spanning scalable capacity, breakthrough performance optimizations, power efficiency innovations and an intelligent platform API with cost-effective economics.

As AI generates massive amounts of data, it has spurred intense demand for data storage. To meet the moment, WD has focused deeply on customer needs, particularly capacity with proven reliability and economics, performance, power efficiency, and faster qualifications without customer business disruptions. During its Innovation Day, WD showcased technologies that address these essential customer requirements and will deliver them at scale.

Western Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: WDC) today reported fiscal second quarter 2026 financial results for the period ended January 2, 2026.

"Western Digital's strong performance this quarter reflects our disciplined execution to meet demand in the AI-driven data economy, and the confidence our customers place in our ability to deliver reliable, high-capacity HDDs at scale," said Irving Tan, CEO of Western Digital. "In our fiscal second quarter, we delivered strong revenue growth and gross margin expansion. During the quarter, free cash flow generation continued to be strong, and we returned over 100% of our free cash flow to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividend payments."

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2026), Sandisk announced Sandisk Optimus as the new name for its renowned internal SSD lineup for gamers, creators, and professionals. The new branding for this family of products reflects a focus on performance leadership, engineering excellence, and a heritage of trust in flash memory. The powerful collection of Sandisk Optimus internal storage solutions, encompasses three product lines: Sandisk Optimus, Sandisk Optimus GX, and Sandisk Optimus GX PRO.

Featuring a striking new packaging and product design inspired by the company's innovation and iconic branding, the introduction of Sandisk Optimus creates room for future growth as the company expands its offerings to support the needs of gamers, creators, and professionals. The new design is inspired by the company's pioneering brand heritage and relentless focus on delivering innovation that delights end users. While the overall look and feel of the Sandisk Optimus brand is boldly different, its product portfolio carries forward Sandisk's long-standing reputation for superior quality and reliability, characteristics that have shaped the company's longstanding legacy of flash innovation.

Western Digital has confirmed it is investigating potential problems with some of its older SMR-based hard drives, following reports from multiple data recovery firms about unusually high failure rates. The affected models include 2 TB, 3 TB, 4 TB, and 6 TB WD Blue and Red drives (model numbers WD*0EZAZ, WD*0EDAZ, and WD*0EFAX) released around 2020, products that previously landed the company in a class-action lawsuit over undisclosed use of SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology. Tom's Hardware reports that Western Digital said in a statement to Heise Online that it takes the findings seriously and that its engineering teams have launched an internal review.

According to 030 Datenrettung Berlin GmbH, which first published the failure analysis, the issue could have its origins in design-level limitations of SMR technology in lower-capacity consumer drives. SMR increases areal density by overlapping data tracks allowing up to 25% more capacity per platter. However, rewriting data can require adjacent tracks to be rewritten as well, introducing latency and potential instability. These shortcomings have long made SMR unsuitable for certain workloads such as RAID or ZFS arrays. Western Digital's earlier decision not to disclose SMR use in these drives led to a $2.7 million lawsuit settlement in 2021. Now, data recovery labs warn that the same models could suffer physical damage and data loss over time. Users with WD Blue or Red drives in the 2-6 TB range from 2020 onward are advised to check their hardware, as early failure symptoms may include unusual clicking or grinding noises from the platters.

Western Digital, the backbone of the AI-driven data economy, today announced the opening of its expanded System Integration and Test (SIT) Lab, a state-of-the-art 25,600 square foot facility designed to accelerate customer success and unlock faster time to value. As AI applications drive unprecedented storage demands, the new lab directly addresses what customers need most: faster, more predictable qualification of Western Digital's reliable high-capacity HDDs.

With strong demand for Western Digital's products, this strategic investment is part of the company's commitment to customer-first priorities. In addition to providing research, development and global operations, the facility's mini data center environment enables real-world testing and validation, ensuring customers receive advanced storage solutions precisely when they need them.

As AI workloads grow in complexity and scale, the ability of storage systems to keep pace with accelerated compute infrastructure has become a critical factor in overall performance. Western Digital (Nasdaq: WDC) today announced its MLPerf Storage V2 submission results, validating the real-world capabilities of its OpenFlex Data24 4000 Series NVMe-oF Storage Platform. The results affirm OpenFlex Data24 EBOF's (Ethernet bunch of flash) ability to meet the rigorous demands of modern AI workloads, delivering high performance, efficiency and scalability in a cost-effective solution for modern AI infrastructure.

Western Digital's OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform extends the high performance of NVMe flash over Ethernet fabric to enable low-latency shared storage for scalable, disaggregated AI infrastructure. Designed to simplify deployment, reduce cost and grow with GPU demand, the OpenFlex Data24 provides the capability of scaling storage and compute independently for more flexibility.

It appears that Wester Digital is getting ready to launch a new performance NVMe SSD in the shape of the WD_Black SN8100, as the drive has tipped up online. Oddly enough, it's not branded as a SanDisk drive, at least not in Europe where the drive is listed for pre-order. It was first spotted by @momomo_us on Amazon Germany, but the company only had the 1 TB SKU listed and a little bit of sleuthing on our side, quickly found the 2 TB and 4 TB SKU's listed with various etailers around the world.

It seems like WD has decided to use the Silicon Motion SM2508 NVMe SSD controller for the SN8100, although this has as yet to be verified and it's likely to be an OEM version of the controller without markings if true. The SN8100 is said to deliver read speeds of up to 14,900 MB/s and write speeds of up to 14,000 MB/s, with the 1 TB SKU being a bit slower at 11,000 MB/s. It should also deliver up to 2,300K IOPS, for both read and write operations. In Europe, the MSRP currently appears to be €200, €300-310 and €550-560 respectively for the different SKUs, which is a massive increase over the SN850X, but in line with recently launched PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs like the Kingston Fury Renegade G5. It's also listed for C$374 and C$560 for the 1 TB and 2 TB SKUs respectively by a Canadian etailer and £170, £260 and £455 in the UK for each of the three SKUs. The official launch date is the 30th of May according to Amazon.

Western Digital Corp. today reported fiscal third quarter 2025 financial results.

"Western Digital executed well in its fiscal third quarter achieving revenue at the high end of our guidance range and gross margin over 40%," said Irving Tan, CEO of Western Digital. "Even in a world marked by geopolitical uncertainty and shifting tariff dynamics, one thing remains constant: the exponential growth of data. When it comes to storing that data, at scale, no technology rivals the cost-efficiency and reliability of HDDs. With our rich portfolio of storage products, WD is uniquely positioned to meet our customers' mass storage needs."

On April 29, 2025, the company's Board of Directors authorized the adoption of a quarterly cash dividend program beginning with the quarter ending June 27, 2025 and declared a cash dividend of $0.10 per share of the company's common stock, payable on June 18, 2025 to shareholders of record as of June 4, 2025.

Essential to cloud data center infrastructure, hard disk drives (HDDs) are complex devices that blend material science, mechanical engineering and physics. As part of its innovation, HDDs use a range of rare earth elements (REEs) like Neodymium (Nd), Praseodymium (Pr) and Dysprosium (Dy), prized for their magnetic properties to help HDDs precisely read and write data. Yet, traditional recycling methods recover only a fraction of these valuable materials, often missing rare earths entirely, leading to unnecessary waste.

In a multi-party pilot program, Western Digital, in collaboration with Microsoft, Critical Materials Recycling (CMR) and PedalPoint Recycling has taken a major step toward closing that loop. Together, the companies transformed ~50,000 pounds of shredded end-of-life HDDs, mounting caddies and other materials into critical high-value materials, all while significantly reducing environmental impact. This pioneering process of creating a new advanced sorting ecosystem with an eco-friendly non-acid process not only recaptures essential rare earth elements but also extracts metals like gold (Au), copper (Cu), aluminium (Al) and steel, feeding them back into the U.S. supply chain, supporting industries that rely on these resources—such as electric vehicles, wind turbines, and advanced electronics. When scaled worldwide, this new recycling process could return a lot of recovered rare earths to the U.S. supply pool, drastically reducing the need for virgin material mining detrimental to people and planet. Today, most primary production (>85%) of REEs occurs outside the U.S. and the current domestic recycling rate for REEs is very low (<10%).

Western Digital (Nasdaq: WDC) announced today that it has hired Ahmed Shihab as Chief Product Officer. Shihab, a seasoned expert in cloud storage needs and requirements, most recently served as Corporate Vice President of Azure Storage at Microsoft. In this role, he led the engineering and operations teams for Object and Block storage, driving the design and development of Microsoft's cloud storage solutions. As Western Digital's new Chief Product Officer, Shihab is responsible for leading product strategy and engineering as the company accelerates innovation and development of HDD products and solutions.

"Ahmed joins Western Digital at a pivotal time for the HDD industry with data generation, AI adoption, and the demand for scalable storage continuing to grow. His expertise will be instrumental in driving innovation and meeting the industry's evolving needs," said Irving Tan, CEO of Western Digital. "Given his tenure with storage and infrastructure design and development, Ahmed is the right leader to move Western Digital forward as we help our customers unleash the power and value of data."

Western Digital (Nasdaq: WDC) announced the successful completion of the planned separation of the company's Flash business. Earlier this month, Western Digital held its Investor Day event where the company shared its vision, strategy and plan to enable its customers to unleash the power and value of data. Looking ahead, Western Digital Chief Executive Officer Irving Tan shares how the future of HDDs begins now here in his latest blog post.

Western Digital (Nasdaq: WDC) held the company's Investor Day today, announcing a vision and strategy for the future as the planned separation of the company's Flash business nears its expected completion on February 21, 2025. CEO Designate Irving Tan reinforced Western Digital's leadership in delivering world-class, sustainable storage solutions at scale. With a deep legacy in HDD technology and innovation, Western Digital remains the trusted partner for the world's largest hyperscalers, CSPs and OEMs, delivering cutting-edge solutions at the right time with low total cost of ownership (TCO). From industry-leading ePMR CMR HDDs and UltraSMR technology, to HAMR and beyond, Western Digital continues to drive innovation across its portfolio, creating unmatched long-term value for its customers.

Tan shared Western Digital's projection on how the proliferation of AI will impact the HDD industry and the value of data stored. As companies generate and store more data, growing use cases such as text-to-image GenAI workloads, text-to-video applications and a rising demand for massive data lakes to fuel AI models are expected to increase HDD exabyte shipments at a 23% CAGR from 2024 to 2028. Western Digital remains steadfast in addressing the ever-growing data demands of the cloud and enterprise markets, delivering the scalability, TCO and sustainability needed to store the majority of the world's generated data, which is expected to grow 3x between 2023 and 2028.

Western Digital Corp. today reported fiscal second quarter 2025 financial results.

"As we finalize the separation of our businesses, we are confident that both Western Digital and Sandisk will continue driving innovation and providing compelling storage solutions to customers while delivering long-term shareholder value," said David Goeckeler, Western Digital CEO. "We expect that our strong performance in HDD and our strategic approach to managing our Flash business within the New Era of NAND will allow each company to capture the growing demand for storage driven by the AI Data Cycle."

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) today announced it is appointing Mike Cordano as the company's executive vice president of worldwide sales, effective immediately. Cordano will succeed Mike Bokan, who announced a few months ago his intention to retire from Micron in fiscal 2025 after more than twenty-eight years with the company. Bokan will support Cordano over the next several months to ensure a seamless transition. Cordano will report directly to Sanjay Mehrotra, President and CEO of Micron.

Cordano joins Micron with a 30-year track record of success in executive leadership, driving innovative business development, and executing successful go-to-market strategies. His experience includes over 8 years at Western Digital (WD), where he held ever-increasing executive positions, including President and Chief Operating Officer and President of the Hitachi Global Storage Technology (HGST) subsidiary. Immediately before the acquisition by WD, he held the position of Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at HGST. Most recently, he was the Founder and Partner of Prime Impact Capital.

Since its introduction in 2004, millions around the world have trusted WD My Passport drives to store and back up their lives' most precious memories and valuable data. To commemorate this milestone anniversary of its most popular drive, Western Digital Corp. is launching the WD My Passport Ultra, 20th Emerald Anniversary Edition. Over the lifetime of the My Passport drives, Western Digital has provided approximately 180 exabytes of data storage for users worldwide, equivalent to up to 18 billion hours of HD video, up to 46 trillion photos, or up to 35 trillion songs.

Prior to the initial introduction of the WD My Passport drive, users had limited options when it came to taking important files with them on the go, having to sacrifice a power outlet and downtime to add and transfer data. In 2004, My Passport delivered a streamlined solution: portable products that offered an impressive amount of storage for many types of digital files - including videos, music, photos, and documents. What started as a simple solution with 40 GB capacity has increased by up to 150 times to now having the world's highest capacity 2.5" portable hard drive with 6 TB of storage, meeting the needs of the modern digital consumer.

More than just storage, Western Digital HDDs are key enablers for businesses looking to optimize their infrastructure, lower TCO and future-proof their data strategies. Constantly innovating to meet the needs of our data-driven world, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that it is now shipping the world's highest capacity UltraSMR HDD with up to 32 TB leveraging the time-tested, reliable energy-assisted PMR (ePMR) recording technology for hyperscalers, CSPs and enterprises. For those who want a drop-in ready HDD for today's data-intensive workloads, the company is also now shipping the world's highest-capacity ePMR CMR HDD with up to 26 TB for enterprise and channel customers. With the world's first commercially available 11-disk design and field-proven technology, these new drives reinforce Western Digital's commitment to delivering HDD technology that raises the bar on capacity, reliability and innovation.

The AI Data Cycle has emerged as a growth driver for the storage industry. As AI systems become more sophisticated, they process and generate vast amounts of data that must be stored efficiently. HDDs play a crucial role in this ecosystem, handling both the input side, where data is gathered, ingested and stored, and the output side, where AI content is generated and preserved. This dual role positions HDDs as a linchpin in the AI Data Cycle, ensuring that data is available when needed and stored with the lowest TCO.