Western Digital is Sold Out of Hard Drives for 2026
5 91Western Digital's entire hard drive manufacturing capacity for calendar year 2026 is now fully spoken for, CEO Irving Tan disclosed during the company's second-quarter earnings call, a stark sign of how aggressively hyperscalers are locking down storage supply to feed their AI infrastructure buildouts.
The company has firm purchase orders from its top seven customers and has signed long-term agreements stretching into 2027 and 2028 that cover both exabyte volumes and pricing. Cloud revenue now accounts for 89% of Western Digital's total, according to the company's VP of Investor Relations, while consumer revenue has shrunk to just 5%.
5 comments
Re:Okay (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @05:40PM (#65993072)
They've done it for you.
Re:Okay (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward ( None ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @07:32PM (#65993272)
Companies are pre-ordering drives for servers that haven't been manufactured yet, for data centers that haven't been built yet, for demand that doesn't exist yet. But don't worry, things won't go to shit. Companies won't suddenly find themselves with a massive inventory of drives that they don't need. None of that will happen, right? Right?
Looking froward to cheap hard drives in 2027.
Just wait (Score: 5, Insightful)
by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @05:19PM (#65993006)
November is bankruptcy month. Hard drives at 90% off.
possible unlikely silver lining for PC tech (Score: 5, Interesting)
by haruchai ( 17472 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @05:25PM (#65993026)
Can this be used to make ECC the default, no more non-error correcting for the consumer market by economy of scale price reduction?
What other enterprise level tech could also become the part of the consumer standard?
Re:Who knew... (Score: 5, Informative)
by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) on <voyager529@y[ ]o.com ['aho' in gap]> on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @12:04AM (#65993582)
Who knew spinning drives will still be a thing for the next couple years?
Approximately 100% of people with more than 2TB of data and anything that vaguely resembles a budget.
Even around this time last year, 4TB spinning drives were under $100, while 4TB SSDs were *at least* $300 each, typically $400 or more. 8TB drives weren't hard to find for under $200 (and flirted with $100 on some sales), but 8TB SSDs were between $700 and $900. A 20TB RAID of mechanical drives could be had for around $1,000; 20TB of SSD storage would cost around five times that.
Meanwhile, OEMs seem to be falling out of love with the SATA form factor, and while PCIe/NVMe is great for throughput for one or two drives, getting eight PCIe drives in an array gets messy pretty quickly. PCIe switches are still niche, expensive, have inconsistent support across OSes, and require awkward cooling solutions. Even if the drives are free, a system capable of presenting 20TB of SSD storage to an OS gets expensive quickly.
More to the point, bulk storage *usually* doesn't have to be *that* fast. Larger storage arrays are most commonly used for backup retention, archiving, DVR storage, "Linux Distros", photographer/videographer repos, and similar loads, for which "I need to put it somewhere" is just fine at the 113Mbytes/sec limit of gigabit ethernet, potentially accelerated by one or two 500GB SSDs as intermediate caches.
So yeah, while HDDs aren't really good as boot volumes anymore, and they're not a default in laptops or desktops anymore, there are plenty of areas where "massive and fast-enough" wins out over raw I/O.