Western Digital's CEO confirmed on their Q2 FY2026 earnings call that the company's entire HDD capacity for 2026 is sold out. Firm purchase orders with their top seven customers, and long-term agreements already locked in for 2027 and 2028.
The numbers
Cloud revenue accounted for 89% of WD's total — $2.7 billion out of $3.02 billion. Consumer HDDs were just 5% of revenue, down 3% year-on-year. Overall revenue was up 25% year-on-year, driven by nearline demand, with 215 exabytes shipped in Q2 alone.
Western Digital is basically an enterprise storage company now. Consumer drives are a rounding error.
What's driving it
First it was DDR5. Then NAND. Now the humble hard drive is getting swallowed by the AI infrastructure buildout. Hyperscalers need somewhere cheap to dump exabytes of training data, inference logs, and backups — and HDDs are still a fraction of the cost per terabyte compared to SSDs.
Tom's Hardware reports that HDD prices have surged roughly 46% since September 2025. WD themselves were more diplomatic on the call — talking about a "stable pricing environment" and "extracting more value." Make of that what you will.
What this means for you
If you're running NAS infrastructure or planning storage refreshes, the window for sensible pricing is closing fast. These aren't speculative forecasts — they're multi-year contracts with price and volume terms already baked in.
For MSPs quoting storage projects right now, it's worth asking: are you building in price escalation clauses, or are you about to eat a margin hit when your next bulk order comes in significantly higher than your last?
Sources
WD Q2 FY2026 press release, earnings call transcript.
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