Western Digital said on the 4th that business related to AI and cloud accounts for 90% of its total revenue.
The corporations plans to completely overhaul its HDD-centered storage strategy to meet the surge in data demand driven by the spread of AI.
Western Digital unveiled an HDD technology roadmap to support the AI data economy at "Innovation Day 2026" on the day.
It simplified its brand to "WD" and redefined its identity as a storage infrastructure corporations targeting AI data centers.
WD presented a medium- to long-term roadmap to expand HDD capacity to more than 100TB. Its current 40TB HDDs are in customer validation, and the goal is to raise capacity in stages to exceed 100TB by 2029. It is developing two types of HDDs in parallel so customers can choose different technologies depending on their environment.
It will also push performance improvements in parallel. WD disclosed technology to boost HDD data processing speed by up to 2x in the near term and up to 8x over the long term. The strategy is to enable HDDs to handle some AI workloads that previously required SSDs.
Improving power efficiency is also key. WD developed HDDs that cut power consumption by about 20% compared with existing models, focusing on lowering AI data centers' operating expense and power burden.
WD will also introduce an open API-based intelligent software platform. The plan is to let customers apply new HDD technology without major changes to their existing systems, speeding storage adoption.
WD Chief Executive Officer Irving Tan said, "In the AI era, capacity, performance, power efficiency and expense must be satisfied at the same time," adding, "WD will establish itself as a core storage infrastructure partner for the AI data economy."