Western Digital has already exhausted its stock of hard drives for the entirety of 2026 — the executive notes that various multi-year contracts for 2027 and 2028 are already established

Western Digital CEO Irving Tan mentioned that the firm has already exhausted its stock of hard drives for 2026. Tan verified this during the organization's Q2 2026 financial results meeting, where, based on the record provided by Investing.com, he further established that several long-term agreements (LTAs) have been secured for the following Couple of years.

“As we highlighted, we’re pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers,” the official stated. “Additionally, we’ve finalized LTAs with two of those for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028. Clearly, these LTAs feature a mix of exabyte scale and cost.” This statement aligns with the findings from the end of last year that hard drives are on backorder for two years owing to significant data center requirements.

The firm's VP for Investor Relations, Ambrish Srivastava, stated that 89% of its earnings originated from Its Cloud business, whereas its consumer business merely contributed 5%. For this reason, it would be logical for the organization to emphasize enterprise customers — much like how memory chip manufacturers opted to center their production on the more profitable HBMs that are currently sought by hyperscalers. The financial value of hard drives has become particularly evident since SSDs are surging to over 16x the cost of a comparable HDD..

Nonetheless, this will represent negative information for fans and shoppers. While numerous individuals favor SSDs for various devices, a demand persists for standard hard drives, particularly for application within NAS systems and permanent data archiving. However, the significant need triggered by the AI infrastructure expansion is creating scarcities for this specific part as well. Several HDD versions have already spiked in cost, with costs jumping by an average of 46% since September 2025.

PC equipment scarcities are just intensifying as the AI competition persists. The initial lack of memory and storage chips has rapidly moved into GPUs and is presently impacting hard drives. The majority of buyers will not experience the HDD squeeze since it has largely become a specialized item lately, yet there is concern that different elements, hardware, and merchandise types will likely mirror this trend regarding rising costs and supply. Scarcities during the upcoming months.

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