We’ve been taking the humble external hard disk drive for granted. Try to buy one when current retail inventory runs out, and you might not have a very good time thanks to a sudden spike in demand from Western Digital’s “top seven customers.”
Though the orthodoxy around Kryder’s Law was to call out the hard drive’s wavering relevancy only a decade ago and bet it all on SSDs, hard drives have enjoyed a bit of a renaissance in the years since. The hard drive’s surprise comeback story is the result not only of scientific breakthroughs in the field of magnet physics, but also of an increase in their demand for AI purposes. Though, as anyone who’s recently tried to purchase a GPU or RAM has probably already guessed, this story doesn’t have a happy ending, at least for the average consumer.
A bear hug of demand from the insatiable AI market more often than not leaves everyone else empty-handed. And as went NVIDIA last year, so goes Western Digital today.
During a recent Q2 earnings call, WD’s CEO Irving Tan told shareholders, “we’re pretty much sold out [of hard drives] for calendar 2026. We have firm POs [purchase orders] with our top seven customers.” You read that correctly. Western Digital, the company you know as the producer of hard drives (if you know them at all) will not be able to sell you a new hard drive until at least 2027. And that’s a load-bearing “at least.” According to Tan on that same call, two of their agreements with these big buyers go to 2027 and another all the way into 2028.
Yes, our old friend the data center is back to make your life miserable in various ways. Hard drives offer more bang for your buck and storage efficiency than their SSD counterparts, so Western Digital’s cloud storage service is an entirely HDD affair. Furthermore, selling that service to its enterprise clients now accounts for 89% of Western Digital’s total revenue. The 5% of revenue chipped in by retail customers like us is clearly no longer even worth the headache.
So, as frustrating as it may be that one of the few bulwarks left between you and yet another subscription service has been yanked from your shopping cart, WD and their competitors telling you to kick rocks actually makes a perverse sort of financial sense—at least in the current economic system we’re all prisoners of.
The hard truth is your grainy concert videos and torrents of Da Ali G Show (It aired on HBO, so why the hell isn’t it on Max?) will forever take a backseat to the handful of companies handing sacks of money around in circles to keep the bubble from bursting for as long as possible.
Better start clearing up space. Or start convincing these companies their vision of an all-AI future won’t and can’t ever come to pass. Up to you.
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