Western Digital Gains from AI Data Surge

Western Digital is seeing rising demand for mass storage as artificial intelligence shifts from training to inference and multi-step agentic workflows. Roughly 80% of hyperscale data center data remains on hard disk drives due to advantages in scale, cost and power efficiency. On 8 September, market reports highlighted this transition as a durable driver of compounding storage needs.

The company began shipping 40TB ePMR drives in June and is ramping volume production. Its 44TB HAMR drive remains on track for the first half of calendar 2027. UltraSMR technology is expected to represent about 60% of nearline exabyte shipments by the end of fiscal 2027. In addition, Western Digital is sampling high-bandwidth drives targeting up to 8x the throughput of current models with five customers.

Over the past year, shares of Western Digital have surged 394.5%, compared with a 391.4% gain for its industry peer group. The stock trades at 20.86 times forward earnings, compared with the industry average of 10.67. Over the past 60 days, Zacks Consensus Estimates for earnings rose 7.5% to $20.03 per share for fiscal 2027 and increased 7.6% to $34.74 per share for fiscal 2028.