Posted on 02/15/2026 10:21:13 AM PST by yesthatjallen
Western Digital has run out of Hard Disk Drive capacity through 2026, with CEO Irving Tan confirming the company is sold out to its top customers as artificial intelligence and enterprise demand consumes storage at unprecedented levels. The shortage has driven HDD prices to their highest point in two years, according to wccftech.com, which reported on Western Digital's Q2 earnings call.
Firm orders through 2028
Speaking during the company's Q2 earnings call, Tan revealed the extent of Western Digital's committed capacity. "As we highlighted, we're pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers. And we've also established LTAs with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028," he said. These long-term agreements combine both volume commitments measured in exabytes and pricing structures.
The shortage reflects a fundamental shift in Western Digital's business model. Cloud revenue now accounts for 89% of total revenue, whilst consumer revenue has dropped to just 5%. This dramatic change highlights how AI infrastructure demand is reshaping the storage industry.
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(Excerpt) Read more at tbreak.com ...
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First no ddr memory and now no hdd.
Does this means all the old memory sticks I have lying around are finally worth something?
🤔
“The shortage reflects a fundamental shift in Western Digital’s business model.”
SanDisk stock up 1,600% ...
All your memory belongs to us.
Jeez…I have a couple 4TB just laying around. Time to eBay them.
Going to be tons of real cheap computer parts when it bursts
Hopefully Seagate and Toshiba can pick up some of the slack. I
Everyone is at capacity
I’m not one to use the cloud (at least knowingly).
Many of you probably feel the same way.
Why is so much storage needed? And for AI?
The only need for such storage I see is to track millions of people as much as possible.
And I don’t see that currently doing the Guthrie family any good.
Around Black Friday I purchased a Ryzen 7 based mini-PC with an Oculink port on sale for $373 which came with 32GB of 5600MHZ DDR5. Around the same time, I purchased an Oculink Dock for $50 along with a power supply for $30 and a barely used GPU with 12GB of VRAM on eBay for $200 to run medium sized Open-source AI models. When I saw the price of DDR5 rapidly escalating in early December I picked up a 64GB 5600MHZ kit for $220. Then there were of course 2 latest generation Samsung 1TB NVMEs for $60 a piece. I also bought 1 touch screen and 2 normal 1900x1200 portable monitors to use with MSFS 2024. These three monitors came to a little less than $200 in total. So, I have a more than a $1000 into it. But I was able to use the 32GB of DDR5 in my wife's laptop.
The 96GB of 5600MHZ DR5 that I have recently installed is now worth as much as I spent on the entire project, and I am still left with 2 8GB sticks of 5600MHZ DDR5 out of the laptop. They are now worth about as much as the $220 I paid for 64GB of name brand DDR5 in December. So yes, depending on what types of RAM you have lying around... they might be worth something more than just a few bucks.
Wow.
I need to go cannibalize the bunch of old PCs I have.
Plus laptop sticks stashed away after upgrades.
The 64gigs in my Alienware 18 are probably worth more than the whole machine.
😳
I suspect cloud storage will start going up in price as well.
People are still buying 8GB DDR?
Is there anything AI can’t ruin?
Wonderful!!! But what are you going to do with all that space?
I’m sorry.
I read that and immediately thought of Kamala waving her hands around in the air.
😆😆😆
I am feeling kind of fortunate that around September of last year I put together a RAID made up of just 2 24TB Seagate 3.5” drives I use this as a NAS (network attached storage) hooked to an inexpensive mini-PC running OpenMediaVault. The price to do this has more than doubled at this point in time. Even refurbished 24TB hard drives are typically more than $400 a piece.
I have bunch of drones and 360 cameras, that can eat up a lot of storage very, very quickly. I also have laptops and desktops many that dual or triple boot along with a bunch of virtual machines largely for hobbyist purposes in my “computer lab” and for general use. I like to keep them backed up. This is not to mention virtual machines that I maintain off site. If you set up systems to run AI models locally the amount of space that is used adds up very quickly, especially if you are generating video. So actually, my storage space does not feel excessive.
But yes, I agree with you... the amount of storage space used by the massive server farms being constructed likely is being used largely for surveillance purposes by both the government and private corporations.
Especially when tech guru Bill Gates declared 640k is all any human will ever need for their entire life.
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