At its Innovation Day 2026, Western Digital unveiled a new customer-centric storage roadmap that reinvents the hard drive for AI needs, reinforcing its position as a strategic storage infrastructure partner for the AI-driven data economy. The announcements reflect how WD’s fundamental business transformation has enabled a new generation of storage technologies spanning scalable capacity, breakthrough performance optimisations, power efficiency innovations and an intelligent platform API with cost-effective economics.
As AI generates massive amounts of data, it has spurred intense demand for data storage. To meet the moment, WD has focused deeply on customer needs, particularly capacity with proven reliability and economics, performance, power efficiency, and faster qualifications without customer business disruptions. During its Innovation Day, WD showcased technologies that address these essential customer requirements and will deliver them at scale.
The announcements represent a new era for WD, building on the strategic moves the company completed over the past year: shifting to long-term customer partnerships based on multi-year commitments; achieving operational excellence through disciplined execution that more than doubled gross profit year-over-year; and cultural transformation through leadership renewal that accelerated decision-making. All of this drove WD’s success and inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 and ranking among top S&P 500 performers in 2025. In addition, a new financial model was shared to reflect the company’s refreshed view for the next 3 to 5 years. The new model is available at investor.wdc.com.
As a capstone to this momentum, the company, now known as WD, also unveiled updated branding that visually references the data centre and reflects its transformation into a company that provides essential storage infrastructure for the AI-driven data economy.
Capacity innovation: Clear path to 100TB+
Reinforcing its dual ePMR and HAMR technology leadership approach, WD announced that the world’s highest capacity 40TB UltraSMR ePMR HDD is in qualification with two hyperscale customers with volume production planned for the second half of 2026. WD HAMR HDD qualifications are also underway with two hyperscale customers with ramp production in 2027.
WD will extend ePMR to 60TB by leveraging HAMR innovations without increasing power consumption, while HAMR will scale to 100TB by 2029. This dual-path approach is a critical advantage as both ePMR and HAMR are built on a common architecture, enabling greater manufacturing efficiencies, yields, and a smoother customer product transition.
The result is unprecedented flexibility. Hyperscalers and enterprises can adopt either technology on their own timelines with predictable capacity planning and seamless scaling – no forced technology transitions, no infrastructure disruptions, just continuous and accelerating capacity growth built on architecture they already trust.
HDD performance architecture: Closing the QLC flash gap
Addressing the performance demands of AI workloads, WD introduced two industry-first innovations that fundamentally reset HDD performance. These innovations address workloads previously considered flash-only, creating a new performance tier that balances speed and capacity without compromising economics, which is critical as flash faces persistent cost premiums (6-10x vs. HDD) and endurance limitations:
- High Bandwidth Drive Technology enables simultaneous reading and writing from multiple heads on multiple tracks delivering up to 2x the bandwidth of conventional HDDs without power penalties. The technology has a clear path to scale up to 8x bandwidth gains and is already in customer hands for validation.
- Dual Pivot Technology adds a second set of independently operating actuators on a separate pivot and will deliver up to 2x sequential IO gain within a 3.5-inch drive. This differs from previous dual actuator designs that sacrificed capacity and required extensive customer software changes. Dual Pivot enables reduced spacing between disks, allowing for more platters per drive and higher overall capacity.
When combined, these technologies will enable WD to increase sequential IO to 4x overall, delivering 100TB HDDs while maintaining the relative IO per TB rate customers enjoy today. This reduces the need for customers to increase SSD deployment or rearchitect services as capacity scales.
High Bandwidth Drive Technology is already with customers today. HDDs with Dual Pivot Technology are currently in the lab and will become available in 2028.
Power-optimised HDDs: Bridging the gap between warm and cold AI data tiers
AI training and inference is creating massive amounts of valuable cold data that still needs to be accessed in seconds, not hours, rendering this data too active for tape but also too expensive for traditional capacity drives. WD’s power-optimised HDDs address this challenge with a purpose-built solution that reduces power consumption, and therefore customer operating costs, while maintaining a sub-second access storage tier with the same 3.5-inch form factor customers use today.
These drives will trade minimal random IO for higher capacity and substantially lower power – an optimal design for cold data – shrinking the gap between warm and cold storage tiers and enabling economically sustainable AI data storage at scale.
Power-optimised drives are expected to be in customer qualification in 2027.
Platforms expansion: Reducing complexity to improve customer time-to-value
Understanding that mid-scale customers face hyperscale challenges without hyperscale resources, WD announced the expansion of its Platforms business to extend hyperscale storage economics to a broader set of customers. This expansion includes the development of an intelligent software layer, through an open API, expected to launch in 2027, that will enable companies at 200+ petabyte scale to achieve the same storage efficiency and economics that hyperscalers enjoy today.
This intelligent software layer will accelerate storage innovation adoption across WD’s UltraSMR, ePMR and HAMR HDD, and flash platforms while dramatically reducing time-to-production and lowering qualification risk across storage tiers. By simplifying the deployment of storage infrastructure for AI-scale workloads, WD will transform time-to-value without requiring architectural disruption – giving up-and-coming cloud and enterprise WD customers a clear path to hyperscale economics.
“For the past year, WD has remained continuously focused on execution and accelerating innovation, which has enabled us to truly reimagine the hard drive to meet the requirements of AI,” said Irving Tan, Chief Executive Officer at WD. “We are showcasing innovation that reflects our deep connection to our customers and how we are meeting demand for capacity, scale, quality, enhanced performance, and ease of technology adoption.”
“WD Innovation Day is where our customer-centric business transformation meets our breakthrough technology for the AI era,” said Ahmed Shihab, Chief Product Officer at WD. “We’ve organised around how customers build and scale AI infrastructure. WD is challenging conventional storage assumptions and removing the complexity and cost barriers that limit their AI-driven growth. Our capacity, performance, power efficiency, and platform innovations solidify our position as the innovation partner for the AI-driven data economy.”
“WD’s Innovation Day revealed a company that has genuinely transformed its strategy around customer infrastructure needs,” said Ed Burns, HDD Research Director at IDC. “The market validation is already evident – customers are deploying these solutions because WD is solving what matters most for AI infrastructure: reliable capacity at scale, performance that meets demanding workloads, and economics that enable profitability. This customer-centric approach, combined with operational discipline positions WD well in the market going forward.”
Discussion about this post