Descriptions:
Bloomberg Tech sits down with Western Digital CEO Irving Tan to discuss the company’s fiscal Q4 2026 results and its position in the AI storage boom. WD posted over 40% revenue growth with gross margins above 54%, but shares came under pressure after the outlook disappointed elevated expectations. Tan attributes the demand outlook to hyperscalers, new cloud providers, and physical AI deployments, projecting more than 25% CAGR in storage demand over the next five years.
A central point of the interview is WD’s technology roadmap: the company is beginning to ship a 40 terabyte hard drive this quarter, up from its current 32 TB flagship, delivering over 30% capacity growth without adding drive unit production — the company is investing in areal density and media engineering rather than manufacturing scale. Tan explains that because AI-generated data is not being deleted, storage requirements compound in a fundamentally different way from compute or memory, which are recycled across workloads.
On the commercial side, WD has long-term agreements locked through 2029 and is in negotiations for LTAs extending to 2030 and 2031. Hyperscaler customers are approaching WD to secure exabyte commitments that far out, but pricing structures — likely tiered around a base price with volume escalators — are still being worked through. The interview offers a grounded view of how AI infrastructure spending is flowing downstream from GPUs and HBM into persistent storage.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Tech · Published August 06, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
