Western Digital has already completely sold out all of its HDD production capacity for the calendar year 2026. This was announced by the company's CEO, Irving Tan, during the report on financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2026.
According to Western Digital's management, the main driver of demand is the rapid expansion of hyperscalers serving the needs of artificial intelligence. The cloud segment and corporate clients now account for 89% of the company's total revenue. For comparison, the share of the consumer segment (ordinary PCs and home devices) has decreased to just 5%.
AI requires colossal amounts of data storage — from training sets and web scraping to inference logs and backups. In large data centers, HDDs remain the most economical and efficient solution for storing data at the exabyte level. This factor led to Western Digital's capacity for the entire year being booked as early as February 2026.