Western digital, now WD, lays out plan for staying on top in AI era

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life, and Western Digital, which just debuted its new name of WD, is feeling good.

That was the main takeaway from WD’s 2026 Innovation Day event in New York City, where executives detailed how the more than half-century-old hard disk drive (HHD) manufacturer is evolving to meet the future demands of AI. CEO Irving Tan said WD is transforming into “a data center company that’s at the heart of AI.”

The only way is up. Tan sees several growth opportunities for WD in the AI era, including the monetization of AI inferencing, the actual act of prompting a model to make a decision based on information it already has.

“Every query that you put in, every prompt, that history has to be stored. That’s going to not only generate significant amounts of data, it’s going to also generate [a] significant amount of storage,” Tan said. Other tech leaders are trying to cash in on inferencing; for example, former Oracle CEO Safra Catz told stakeholders on a 2025 earnings call that the company was “aggressively pursuing” the inferencing market.

Another massive growth opportunity for WD is the booming demand for storage in this era of multi-modal LLMs, autonomous vehicles, and robotics.

“It’s very clear that HHDs will be dominant data storage media for raw data, content storage, [and] new content generation,” said Tan, adding that WD plans to unveil new capabilities that may allow it to grow in disaggregated storage, a type of storage where storage capacity is split apart from compute resources, allowing storage to be scaled easily.

Keep it 100. At the company event, WD announced plans to roll out 100-terabyte heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) drives by 2029. WD claims its 40 terabyte UltraSMR energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) HDD is the world’s current highest-capacity drive.

Moving on up. WD’s strategy has been a long time in the making. During a Q4 2024 earnings call, former CEO David Goeckeler told listeners that AI data cycles and technologies would present ample opportunities for the company.

“Given this landscape, we expect [flash products] to benefit from both AI training and inference while HDD is poised to benefit at both the input and output stages of these AI models,” Goeckeler said. Goeckeler is now the CEO of Sandisk, an independent company spun off from WD’s former flash business.

As AI and other technologies evolve, WD needs to keep evolving with it. “We’re going to focus on delivering innovations that are required to power the AI workloads of the future, and to address some of the limitations that HDDs have,” Tan said at the Feb. 3 event. “Higher bandwidth requirements [and] higher throughput requirements are what AI technology applications need going forward, and you’re going to hear a lot more how we’re going to address them.”