ويسترن ديجيتال: مخزون الـ HDD لهذا العام محجوز بالكامل لشركات الـ AI!

Production capacity for Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) has been exhausted for the current year following the signing of massive supply contracts with major Artificial Intelligence clients. During a results announcement meeting, the company’s CEO revealed that all production capacity for 2026 has already been reserved. Confirmed purchase orders exist from the company’s top seven clients, along with long-term supply agreements for 2027 with two of them and another extending into 2028. These contracts involve quantities measured in Exabytes, equivalent to one billion Gigabytes.

The company’s focus on enterprise clients is driven by revenue distribution, where cloud computing accounts for 89% of total revenue compared to just 5% from the consumer sector. This disparity reflects the significantly larger demand from large-scale enterprises. The growing demand for HDDs is directly linked to the global expansion of data centers, particularly in the United States, which rely on these drives to store vast amounts of data required for training AI models. Despite the rise of SSDs, HDDs remain the preferred choice for AI companies due to their superior price-to-storage ratio.

These comments come alongside warnings from industry experts, such as the CEO of Phison, who previously indicated that DRAM and NAND shortages could extend beyond 2030. This situation illustrates how AI companies are now driving shortages across multiple memory sectors, including HDDs, RAM, and NAND flash.