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."

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.

Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs) are among the most sought-after commodities in computing today, as the expansion of AI data centers consumes everything in its path. According to Seagate, Sandisk, and Western Digital, demand is so high that customers are signing long-term supply agreements lasting up to five years. This duration is significant because customers are now planning their contracts around demand expansion, which is not only substantial but will also bring better balance to the supply chain. With customers driving steady demand, HDD and SSD manufacturers know exactly how much spinning rust or NAND Flash to produce to meet this demand. Over time, this is a positive development for a supply chain that will adapt with expanding production capacity. However, it poses a short-term challenge for PC gamers.

For example, at the start of this year, we reported that HDD prices have soared by an average of 46% since mid-September. These changes have made spinning rust an expensive commodity, but this is minor compared to NAND Flash prices, which have increased 500% in just a few months. The expansion of AI data centers has depleted any remaining inventory of HDDs and SSDs, leaving the consumer PC market to compete for the few remaining units available for gaming PCs. Interestingly, HDDs contain almost no silicon for storage purposes, so their significant price increases are a supply chain issue unrelated to the semiconductor industry. Apart from the controllers that use silicon, HDD platters are made from materials that are not currently in short supply. However, high demand keeps their prices elevated.

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."

Jeff Kaplan, of former Blizzard fame, having worked on Overwatch and World of Warcraft, has officially announced the first game in development at his newly formed Kintsugiyama studio. The Legend of California is a Western shooter with online co-op and PvP gameplay. The Legend of California is set in an alternate timeline version of California in which the state is discovered as an uninhabited island off the coast of the mainland USA. It will feature a hand-crafted world featuring real-world landmarks, like Yosemite and Death Valley, but interspersed with dynamic points of interest that will move around depending on the generated world seed.

In a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast, Kaplan explains that he wants the game to feel like a world that you can live in, with gameplay mechanics often limited to survival games, like mining, exploration, crafting, and hunting. He says that the goal of the game is not to be historically accurate, but that the development team wanted to remain authentic to the aesthetic and feel of the historical gold rush time period. In terms of gameplay, Kaplan commented that the map will feature four difficulty levels, with different regions and POIs each getting a difficulty level assigned each time the world is generated anew. The Legend of California will launch in Steam Early Access in 2026, and it's so far unclear if there will be a console version.

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.

Earlier this week, Thai news outlets have reported a recent approval of a major THB2.3 billion (~$73.81 million USD) investment into Western Digital's local operations. The Southeast Asian nation's Board of Investment (BOI) gave the thumbs up to a new on-site HAMR HDD technology research and development project. Western Digital's central location has grown over the past couple of years—for example, around August 2024, Thailand's BOI gave a proposed HDD production hub enlargement the greenlight. Fresh news items outline an upcoming research and development project that will focus on HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology, with a view to enhance hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturing capabilities. Additional details mention an international collaboration; involving the North American and Japanese teams—the Thai unit seems to be tasked with devising key components and HAMR's crucial "laser-based data recording process." Earlier on in February, WD's Innovation Day 2026 roadmapped an extensive future HAMR release cadence. By the end of the decade, the data storage specialist projects the debut of 100+ TB drives.

According to reports from Chinese local media, Apple is considering partnering with Chinese semiconductor manufacturers CXMT and YMTC for its upcoming iPhone 18 series and potentially other products like MacBooks and Mac computers. With memory and storage suppliers such as Kioxia, Samsung, and SK hynix raising prices due to a significant industry shortage, Apple is experiencing a squeeze on its profit margins while maintaining the same MSRP for its products. To diversify its supply chain, Apple is reportedly exploring the addition of DRAM from CXMT and NAND Flash from YMTC to reduce its dependence on South Korean and Japanese suppliers.

Recently, the U.S. Government's Bureau of Industry and Security reportedly removed CXMT and YMTC from the list of restricted Chinese companies. This move could benefit Apple, which may now utilize products from both firms. CXMT offers LPDDR5X and DDR5 memory, which aligns with Apple's needs for its products. Since Apple's iPhones and M-series SoCs primarily use LPDDR5X memory, CXMT's 12 Gb and 16 Gb LPDDR5X capacities could serve both the smartphone and computer sectors effectively.

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 has today presented its latest effort to catch up with traditional QLC NAND Flash SSDs by improving its HDD offerings. With the latest High-Bandwidth HDDs, Western Digital has implemented two new technologies in a classical multi-platter HDD design. The first innovation comes in a form of High Bandwidth Drive Technology, which enables double the I/O bandwidth with a path to 8x the current bandwidth in the future. It relies on simultaneous reading and writing from multiple heads on multiple tracks, which is already in customer hands for validation. The second one is Dual Pivot Technology that introduces a second set of independent actuators on a separate pivot, which will not scarify drive capacity unlike older dual actuator designs.

Using Dual Pivot Technology, HDDs can pack more drive platters in a standard 3.5-inch body for higher capacities, and the performance grows by an additional 2x, which is 4x I/O bandwidth compared to today's drives. This technology will pave the way for 100 TB HDDs, that offer speeds comparable to QLC-based SATA III SSDs, at much better price/performance ratio and better data retention, prompting the massive boom of HDD development. Western Digital's drives with High Bandwidth Drive Technology are already shipping to customers, while drives with Dual Pivot Technology are in development in Western Digital's labs and are scheduled to become available in 2028, with early customer sampling probably much sooner.

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."

ASUS today announced an all-new lineup of enterprise and AI/HPC-optimized storage and infrastructure solutions at Supercomputing 2025 (SC25). Recognizing the escalating demands of scaling AI models and memory-intensive workloads, ASUS storage solutions are now a strategic imperative, critical for sustaining efficient AI data processing and managing rapidly expanding datasets. This launch further solidifies the company's position as a total infrastructure provider, delivering an integrated ecosystem spanning compute, storage, networking, and services. ASUS, through its robust global supply chain and logistical capabilities, ensures consistent, reliable product delivery, establishing itself as a trusted partner for organizations deploying resilient and scalable AI environments.

ASUS delivers a full spectrum of storage solutions across block, file, object, and software-defined systems—ensuring flexibility from edge to cloud, and from enterprise applications to AI and HPC workloads. The portfolio supports storage for Enterprise and AI/HPC needs, providing resilient data foundations and scalable performance for data-driven environments.

Western Digital has quietly introduced a new ultra-dense storage rack called the Ultrastar Data102. This 4U rack shelf holds 102 3.5-inch drives, offering just over three petabytes of raw storage when equipped with today's 30 TB hard disks. Upgrading to 32 TB drives increases the raw capacity to about 3.26 PB, providing a modest but valuable boost for customers aiming to maximize terabytes per rack unit. The chassis is designed for dense, continuous operation, featuring redundant, hot-swappable power supplies, front-serviceable cooling, and SAS host connectivity suitable for large storage fabrics.

Western Digital's product documentation indicates 102 drive bays without separate SSD mounting points. However, there is room for up to 3.84 TB of SSD capacity for a hybrid storage design. A fully populated enclosure is both heavy and power-intensive, accommodating up to two 80 Plus Platinum 1800 W power supplies. Cloud providers, archival services, and AI training clusters that prioritize raw capacity and cost per TB will find the Ultrastar Data102 appealing. However, organizations needing integrated flash tiers might opt for enclosures that explicitly include SSD bays. As with other enterprise-grade systems, the final price is typically negotiated through OEM and integrator channels rather than listed as a retail figure.

Western Digital Corp. today reported fiscal first quarter 2026 financial results for the period ended October 3, 2025.

"Western Digital continues to execute well in a strong demand environment driven by growth of data storage in the cloud. In our fiscal first quarter, we achieved revenue and gross margin above the high end of our guidance range, while delivering strong free cash flow," said Irving Tan, CEO of Western Digital. "As AI accelerates data creation, Western Digital's continued innovation and operational discipline position us well to capture new opportunities and drive sustained shareholder value. Reflecting confidence in the company's strong business momentum, the Board of Directors has increased the quarterly cash dividend on the company's common stock by 25% to $0.125 per share."

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.

Industry insiders cited by TrendForce say wait times for HDDs now stretch to almost a year. This has pushed Western Digital to join other companies in raising storage prices across its whole HDD range. Western Digital becomes the third major storage maker to change its prices. SanDisk upped its NAND prices by 10%, while Micron froze its prices for a week. The company points to sky-high demand for all its HDD sizes as the reason for these gradual price hikes. It also cites ongoing work on cutting-edge technology. Western Digital plans to ship more products by sea, which will add 6-10 weeks to current shipping times. The company asks customers to keep these longer delivery times in mind when they place orders.

With cloud giants like Google and Oracle increasing efforts to enhance their infrastructure, the impact on the demand for high-capacity storage is adding tension to the storage market, causing a significant mismatch between supply and demand. To tackle the long wait times for HDDs, memory makers are working hard to come up with Nearline SSD options. They aim to shrink the price difference between SSDs and HDDs from 4 to 5 times to about 3 times making SSDs more tempting for customers who don't want to wait for HDDs. The storage industry is adjusting its prices because of the huge demand for infrastructure as AI services grow fast and suppliers are having a tough time ramping up production to keep up with the sky-high demand for all types of storage.

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.

Western Digital is ready with the WD Blue SN5100, the successor to the WD Blue SN5000 that the company launched in June 2024. While the SN5000 offered sequential speeds of up to 5.5 GB/s reads and up to 5 GB/s writes for the top 4 TB model; the SN5100 steps up performance, offering up to 6.6 GB/s of sequential reads for even the entry level 500 GB model. For context, the SN5000 only offers up to 5 GB/s sequential reads and up to 4 GB/s sequential writes for its 500 GB model. The drive features an M.2 NVMe Gen 4 x4 interface. The WD Blue SN5100 also sees Western Digital more closely integrate the SanDisk branding with its client-segment SSDs. The main Western Digital brand makes way for SanDisk, while the brand extension WD Blue is retained.

Western Digital Corp. today reported fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 financial results for the period ended June 27, 2025.

Q4FY25 Highlights:

• Revenue of $2.61 billion, up 30% year over year
• GAAP diluted EPS of $0.67 and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $1.66
• Cash flow from operations of $746 million; free cash flow of $675 million
• Fiscal year 2025 revenue of $9.52 billion, up 51% year over year.
• Q1FY26 revenue expected to be up 22% year over year at mid-point

"Western Digital executed well in its fiscal fourth quarter, achieving revenue and gross margin above the high end of our guidance range while delivering strong free cash flow. In addition, during the quarter, we reduced debt by $2.6 billion, initiated a cash dividend, and announced the authorization of a $2.0 billion share repurchase program, reflecting our confidence in the long-term cash generating capability of our business," said Irving Tan, CEO of Western Digital. "We are confident that HDDs will continue to remain the foundation of the world's data infrastructure, delivering unmatched value for mass storage in an AI-driven future."

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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.