Western Digital (Nasdaq: WDC) held the company's Investor Day today, announcing a vision and strategy for the future as the planned separation of the company's Flash business nears its expected completion on February 21, 2025. CEO Designate Irving Tan reinforced Western Digital's leadership in delivering world-class, sustainable storage solutions at scale. With a deep legacy in HDD technology and innovation, Western Digital remains the trusted partner for the world's largest hyperscalers, CSPs and OEMs, delivering cutting-edge solutions at the right time with low total cost of ownership (TCO). From industry-leading ePMR CMR HDDs and UltraSMR technology, to HAMR and beyond, Western Digital continues to drive innovation across its portfolio, creating unmatched long-term value for its customers.

Tan shared Western Digital's projection on how the proliferation of AI will impact the HDD industry and the value of data stored. As companies generate and store more data, growing use cases such as text-to-image GenAI workloads, text-to-video applications and a rising demand for massive data lakes to fuel AI models are expected to increase HDD exabyte shipments at a 23% CAGR from 2024 to 2028. Western Digital remains steadfast in addressing the ever-growing data demands of the cloud and enterprise markets, delivering the scalability, TCO and sustainability needed to store the majority of the world's generated data, which is expected to grow 3x between 2023 and 2028.To meet this demand today and into the future, Tan announced that the company's HAMR development is accelerating as testing is underway with two major hyperscale customers. With the company's differentiated portfolio of scalable capacity across ePMR and UltraSMR technologies, and with UltraSMR gains extending to HAMR, Western Digital is enabling its customers to plan long-term while leveraging expanding capacity points available today. This helps ensure a predictable, scalable economic transition for customers while achieving maximum value as their data center environments evolve.

"The future holds tremendous opportunity, and Western Digital is well-positioned to be the leader in data storage as we meet our customers' storage needs today and into the future," said Tan. "We are not just advancing the future of HDD—we're unleashing the power and value of data for enterprise and cloud customers worldwide."

The company's new strategic approach underscores Western Digital's dedication to meeting customer demands today while positioning for future growth. In support, Tan shared that the team's expertise and intellectual property across physics, material sciences and manufacturing capability is being applied to exploring new growth opportunities in areas such as servo-mechanics, magnetics and systems design.