Western Digital is already sold out of hard drives for all of 2026 — chief says some long-term agreements for 2027 and 2028 already in place

Western Digital Chief Executive Officer Irving Tan said that the company has already sold out of hard drives for 2026. Tan confirmed this during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call, where, according to the transcript shared by Investing.com, he also confirmed that there are already some long-term agreements (LTAs) in place for the next couple of years.

“As we highlighted, we’re pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers,” the executive said. “And we’ve also established LTAs with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028. Obviously, these LTAs have a combination of volume of exabytes and price.” This announcement is on track with the report from late last year that hard drives are on backorder for two years due to massive data center demand.

The company’s VP for Investor Relations, Ambrish Srivastava, said that 89% of its revenue came from its Cloud business, while its consumer business only delivered 5%. Because of this, it would make sense for the company to focus more on enterprise clients — similar to how memory chip makers decided to focus production on the more lucrative HBMs that are in demand from hyperscalers. The cost efficiency of hard drives has especially become more apparent now that SSDs are skyrocketing to more than 16x the price of an equivalent HDD.

Article continues below

However, this is going to be bad news for enthusiasts and consumers. Although many people prefer SSDs for most electronics, there is still a market for consumer hard drives, especially for use in NAS systems and long-term data storage. But the massive demand brought by the AI infrastructure buildout is causing shortages even for this component. Many HDD models have surged in pricing already, with costs jumping by an average of 46% since September 2025.

PC hardware shortages are only getting worse as the AI race continues. What started as a memory and storage chip shortage has soon spread into GPUs and is now hitting hard drives. Most consumers won’t feel the HDD pinch as it’s mostly a niche product in recent years, but we’re afraid that other parts, components, and product categories are going to follow suit with the price increases and supply shortages in the coming months.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

TOPICS

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

9 Comments Comment from the forums

thesyndrome

Can't buy RAM

Can't buy SSDs

Can't buy HDDs

Thanks AI techbros, you're doing a really good job of making sure everyone in tech absolutely hates AI (y)
Reply
Zaranthos

Define "sold out". They say "pretty much sold out" which is exactly what I would say to maximize my profits for anyone who hadn't placed orders yet so I can say, well we're about at capacity but maybe we can squeeze your order in. How many of those "almost sold out orders" are for Walmart,, Best Buy, Amazon, Newegg, and other retailers who will have product in stock? If you want the best deals you place huge orders far in advance so you can get the best volume pricing.

Then after all that they probably have plenty of opportunities to find ways to increase production or work some overtime like literally every other business in the world does when business is really good.

Some of this is sensationalized headlines and market driven hype to get you to run out and buy something. I bought my AMD GPU long before the "the AI sky is falling" hysteria started and the current prices are about the same as I paid when I got my brand new GPU.
Reply
Eximo

GPUs aren't the super common purchase us enthusiasts think it is. They can sit on the shelf a while and the assemblers work through a stock of GPUs and VRAM. The price changes are coming down the pipeline.
Reply
txfeinbergs

thesyndrome said:
Can't buy RAM

Can't buy SSDs

Can't buy HDDs

Thanks AI techbros, you're doing a really good job of making sure everyone in tech absolutely hates AI (y)
What is really funny is that you pretty much need PCs to be able to use AI, but you can't buy them.
Reply
AchakBrooks

txfeinbergs said:
What is really funny is that you pretty much need PCs to be able to use AI, but you can't buy them.
Don't worry you can rent them soon (y)...
Reply
80251

This is like the cryptocurrency incited GPU shortage -- only much, much worse.

I can't ever remember an industry wide HDD shortage. I can remember RAM shortages (some of which may have been engineered by the RAM manufacturers themselves) and the cryptocurrency caused GPU shortage but never an HDD shortage or an SSD shortage.

Is the AI industry also affecting CPU availability? Maybe just for server grade CPUs?
Reply
Eximo

I imagine consumer CPU availabilty is great, no one can afford memory.

Need computers to run AI, so energy efficient CPUs would certainly be needed to fill out all those data centers. I'm sure AMD and Intel are quite happy with the scenario. And all the bespoke AI SoCs with custom AI hardware are likely eating into new fab share in a greater ratio than before. Eventually, that will catch up to us and there will be a limited supply of consumer CPUs.

Now AMD has an advantage here in that all of their not so perfect CCDs can end up as consumer grade chips. The leaky ones tend to be your X and K chips anyway, the efficient ones are reserved for mobile and locked chip versions.
Reply
80251

Eximo said:
I imagine consumer CPU availabilty is great, no one can afford memory.

Need computers to run AI, so energy efficient CPUs would certainly be needed to fill out all those data centers. I'm sure AMD and Intel are quite happy with the scenario. And all the bespoke AI SoCs with custom AI hardware are likely eating into new fab share in a greater ratio than before. Eventually, that will catch up to us and there will be a limited supply of consumer CPUs.

Now AMD has an advantage here in that all of their not so perfect CCDs can end up as consumer grade chips. The leaky ones tend to be your X and K chips anyway, the efficient ones are reserved for mobile and locked chip versions.
Why doesn't AMD do what Intel does and cherry pick the good CCDs and sell them as halo parts -- like Intel does w/the 14900kf?
Reply
Eximo

80251 said:
Why doesn't AMD do what Intel does and cherry pick the good CCDs and sell them as halo parts -- like Intel does w/the 14900kf?
With the exception of the monolithic mobile chips, that is what they do. All of AMDs product segmentation for the CCDs is quality based. Those that have the clock speed at lower power end up as mobile SKUs, or as part of large scale Epyc and Threadripper SKUs. The leaky ones that can clock high but use more power are your top end consumer CPUs. And of course the six core CCDs are the cripples and end up being used wherever the multiples of 6 are useful. And then you have the X3D parts that basically have to be built hoping they survive the process, which is why they command a higher price. Yields are assuredly lower.

Intel similarly makes mobile chips and S class desktop chips, just that their entire product stack is not one silicon design used repeatedly. Their Xeon line is a separate entity, core architecture designs aside. Only difference between Desktop, Threadripper, and Epyc is the I/O die that connects them to the CCDs (and the packaging)
Reply

Show more comments