Western Digital bets on pricing and HAMR, not new capacity, as Toshiba plans to double output

What happened

On its October 22 earnings call, Western Digital explained how it intends to meet a sharp rise in hard-drive demand: it will not build more drives, but will keep raising price per terabyte, pack more data into each drive, and spend its capital on recording heads and disk media rather than assembly capacity. That leaves its growth dependent on how quickly it moves to heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), a technology in which Seagate is already shipping at scale. Per the title, Toshiba plans to double output. The stated cause is a sharp rise in hard-drive demand.

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: DigiTimes Asia · 10/22/2026 · View original source