Western Digital lays out AI-era storage roadmap, targeting 100TB+ HDDs and hyperscale economics
Western Digital has set out an ambitious roadmap to reinvent hard-disk storage for the AI era, signalling a strategic shift as demand for large-scale, cost-efficient data infrastructure accelerates.
At its Innovation Day 2026, the company outlined a customer-centric storage strategy aimed squarely at the needs of hyperscalers and enterprises grappling with the explosive growth of AI-generated data. The announcements underline how Western Digital’s recent business transformation has translated into a new generation of storage technologies focused on capacity, performance, power efficiency and faster deployment. all delivered with predictable economics.
AI workloads are producing unprecedented volumes of data, intensifying pressure on storage platforms to scale reliably without inflating cost or energy consumption. Western Digital said its roadmap has been shaped by direct customer priorities, particularly the need for higher capacity with proven reliability, improved performance for AI-adjacent workloads, greater power efficiency, and smoother qualification cycles that do not disrupt live operations.
The unveiling also marked a symbolic shift for the company, now branded simply as WD, reflecting its evolution into a core infrastructure provider for the AI-driven data economy. This follows a year of strategic changes, including a move towards multi-year customer commitments, tighter operational execution that more than doubled gross profit year-on-year, and leadership renewal that has accelerated decision-making. The transformation helped WD secure a place in the Nasdaq 100 and rank among the top performers in the S&P 500 during 2025.
A clear path beyond 100TB
At the heart of the roadmap is capacity expansion. WD confirmed that its 40TB UltraSMR ePMR hard drive — currently the highest-capacity HDD in the industry — is already in hyperscale qualification, with volume production targeted for the second half of 2026. In parallel, qualification of its HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) drives is under way, with ramp-up planned for 2027.
The company is pursuing a dual-path strategy: extending ePMR technology to 60TB by incorporating HAMR innovations without increasing power consumption, while scaling HAMR to 100TB by 2029. Because both technologies share a common architecture, WD said customers will benefit from smoother transitions, higher manufacturing yields and predictable capacity planning — without being forced into disruptive technology shifts.
Rethinking HDD performance for AI
WD is also targeting workloads traditionally reserved for flash. Two new performance innovations aim to narrow the gap between HDDs and QLC flash, which remains significantly more expensive and faces endurance constraints.
High Bandwidth Drive Technology allows simultaneous reads and writes across multiple heads and tracks, delivering up to twice the bandwidth of conventional HDDs without additional power draw. The technology, already in customer validation, has a roadmap to scale bandwidth gains as high as eightfold.
Complementing this is Dual Pivot Technology, which introduces a second, independently operating actuator within the same 3.5-inch form factor. Unlike earlier dual-actuator designs, WD said this approach avoids capacity trade-offs and does not require major software changes. Together, the two technologies are expected to deliver up to four times the sequential I/O performance, enabling 100TB drives while preserving today’s I/O-per-terabyte ratios.
Power efficiency for AI data tiers
As AI training and inference generate vast volumes of “cold” data that still needs rapid access, WD is positioning power-optimised HDDs as a new middle ground between warm storage and tape. These drives sacrifice minimal random I/O in favour of higher capacity and substantially lower power consumption, offering sub-second access at lower operating cost.
Customer qualification for these power-optimised drives is expected in 2027, with WD positioning them as a way to make large-scale AI data retention economically sustainable.
Extending hyperscale economics
Beyond hardware, WD announced an expansion of its Platforms business, aimed at mid-scale customers facing hyperscale-level challenges without equivalent resources. A new intelligent software layer, built around an open API and expected in 2027, is designed to help organisations managing more than 200 petabytes of data achieve hyperscale-like efficiency and economics.
This software layer will simplify adoption across WD’s UltraSMR, ePMR, HAMR and flash portfolios, reducing qualification risk and accelerating time-to-production — without forcing customers to re-architect their environments.
Summing up the shift, Irving Tan, Chief Executive Officer at WD, said the company had “reimagined the hard drive” to meet AI-driven requirements, moving from assumptions to data-backed execution rooted in customer needs. Chief Product Officer Ahmed Shihab added that the focus on capacity, performance and simplicity was designed to remove cost and complexity barriers that limit AI-led growth.
Industry observers see the strategy as well-timed. Ed Burns, HDD Research Director at IDC, noted that customers are already deploying WD’s solutions because they address what matters most for AI infrastructure: reliable capacity at scale, performance for demanding workloads and economics that support profitability.
Taken together, the announcements position Western Digital as a storage partner seeking not just to keep pace with the AI data surge, but to shape how the next decade of AI infrastructure is built.
