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Western Digital argues AI's longer payoff lies in stored data, not compute
What happened
On its fiscal first-quarter earnings call on October 22, Western Digital argued that demand for hard drives depends less on the current wave of AI spending than investors fear. The company said demand for disk storage now comes from four separate sources: cloud services, model training, inference and AI agents, and physical AI. Each, it said, could offset weakness in the others. The company is also trying to move hard drives into faster AI workloads that are currently served by flash memory. The source does not state the cause.
Impact and signal
Medium impactImpact score: 30/100
Affected components and suppliers
hard drivesdisk storageflash memory
AI demandstorageearnings calldemand commentary
Source and time
Source: DigiTimes Asia · 10/22/2026 · View original source
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