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.

More than just storage, Western Digital HDDs are key enablers for businesses looking to optimize their infrastructure, lower TCO and future-proof their data strategies. Constantly innovating to meet the needs of our data-driven world, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that it is now shipping the world's highest capacity UltraSMR HDD with up to 32 TB leveraging the time-tested, reliable energy-assisted PMR (ePMR) recording technology for hyperscalers, CSPs and enterprises. For those who want a drop-in ready HDD for today's data-intensive workloads, the company is also now shipping the world's highest-capacity ePMR CMR HDD with up to 26 TB for enterprise and channel customers. With the world's first commercially available 11-disk design and field-proven technology, these new drives reinforce Western Digital's commitment to delivering HDD technology that raises the bar on capacity, reliability and innovation.

The AI Data Cycle has emerged as a growth driver for the storage industry. As AI systems become more sophisticated, they process and generate vast amounts of data that must be stored efficiently. HDDs play a crucial role in this ecosystem, handling both the input side, where data is gathered, ingested and stored, and the output side, where AI content is generated and preserved. This dual role positions HDDs as a linchpin in the AI Data Cycle, ensuring that data is available when needed and stored with the lowest TCO.

Fueling the next wave of AI innovation, Western Digital today introduced a six-stage AI Data Cycle framework that defines the optimal storage mix for AI workloads at scale. This framework will help customers plan and develop advanced storage infrastructures to maximize their AI investments, improve efficiency, and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their AI workflows. AI models operate in a continuous loop of data consumption and generation - processing text, images, audio and video among other data types while simultaneously producing new unique data. As AI technologies become more advanced, data storage systems must deliver the capacity and performance to support the computational loads and speeds required for large, sophisticated models while managing immense volumes of data. Western Digital has strategically aligned its Flash and HDD product and technology roadmaps to the storage requirements of each critical stage of the cycle, and today introduced a new industry-leading, high-performance PCIe Gen 5 SSD to support AI training and inference; a high-capacity 64 TB SSD for fast AI data lakes; and the world's highest capacity ePMR, UltraSMR 32 TB HDD for cost-effective storage at scale.

"There's no doubt that Generative AI is the next transformational technology, and storage is a critical enabler. The implications for storage are expected to be significant as the role of storage, and access to data, influences the speed, efficiency and accuracy of AI Models, especially as larger and higher-quality data sets become more prevalent," said Ed Burns, Research Director at IDC. "As a leader in Flash and HDD, Western Digital has an opportunity to benefit in this growing AI landscape with its strong market position and broad portfolio, which meets a variety of needs within the different AI data cycle stages."

As new applications, use cases and connected devices multiply, Western Digital's enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDDs) remain critical for helping data center customers design more cost-efficient, scalable and sustainable infrastructure. When combined with the emergence of generative AI and the multitude of innovative applications it is enabling, the demand for high-capacity, low-power and reliable storage is poised to surge.

Western Digital leverages numerous technology innovations - ePMR, OptiNAND, UltraSMR and more - to deliver predictable capacity growth in scalable, highly reliable products. Western Digital is now shipping its new 10-disk 24 TB CMR HDD family for hyperscale, cloud and enterprise data center customers. Sampling since August, the new 28 TB SMR HDD is also ramping, adding to the company's SMR leadership position and momentum as its 26 TB SMR HDD exabyte shipments reached nearly half of its data center exabytes shipped in the first quarter fiscal year 2024.