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Western Digital (WDC) investor relations material
Western Digital 53rd Annual Nasdaq Investor Conference summary
Complete event summary combining all related documents: earnings call transcript, report, and slide presentation.Market demand and growth drivers
Strong HDD demand driven by ongoing cloud migration and AI, with exabyte growth rates trending in the mid-20% range and last quarter reaching 30%.
AI increases the value and volume of stored data, especially video, with industrial applications like autonomous vehicles generating and storing vast amounts of video for model training.
Most incremental demand comes from established hyperscalers, while newer AI-centric players leverage existing hyperscale storage infrastructure.
Firm purchase orders from top five hyperscalers extend through 2026, with one through 2027, providing strong forward visibility.
Data center business now represents 90% of operations, up from 50% five years ago, reflecting a strategic shift.
Supply, capacity, and technology innovation
No plans to add unit capacity; focus is on increasing areal density to deliver higher exabytes per drive, improving TCO for customers.
Tight supply-demand environment expected to persist into 2026, with investments in head and media facilities to support next-gen technology.
Average shipped drive capacity rose to 22 TB, up 21% year-over-year, aligning with demand growth.
Technology roadmap includes qualifying a 36 TB Ultra SMR drive in early 2026 and launching HAMR in volume in 2027, with both PMR and HAMR to coexist before full transition.
Customers prioritize exabyte delivery and reliability over specific technologies, with contracts being technology-agnostic.
Pricing, customer relationships, and competitive landscape
Pricing per exabyte has been stable to slightly up, a shift from historical 7% annual price deflation, with stability expected for the next few years.
Customers value high volume, scalability, and reliability over price, with higher capacity drives improving their TCO despite modest price increases.
HDDs maintain a significant TCO and acquisition cost advantage over enterprise SSDs, with 6x device cost and 3.6x TCO advantage, and this gap is widening.
Risk of eSSD substitution is low in the near term due to entrenched data center architectures and volatile SSD pricing.
Customer relationships have become more direct and strategic, with greater visibility into future use cases and storage needs.
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