NEW YORK, December 29, 2025, 13:09 ET — Regular session
Western Digital Corp (WDC.O) shares fell in Monday afternoon trading, slipping more than the broader market. The stock was down 1.0% at $179.68, after trading between $176.80 and $184.60, with about 1.9 million shares changing hands.
The dip keeps attention on a stock that has become a proxy for the surge in data-center spending tied to artificial intelligence. Investors have chased storage suppliers on expectations that demand for capacity — and pricing for premium drives — stays firm into 2026.
Barron’s said Western Digital is set to finish 2025 as the S&P 500’s top performer, up 303%, as demand for the company’s highest-capacity, highest-margin hard drives at data centers “has exploded.” Seagate CEO Dave Mosley told the publication that “AI is fundamentally reshaping hard drive demand by elevating the economic value of data and data storage,” while Western Digital declined to comment in its pre-earnings “quiet period.” 1
The broader market was lower, with the SPDR S&P 500 ETF down about 0.5% and the iShares Semiconductor ETF off about 0.7%.
Peer Seagate Technology (STX.O) fell about 1.0%, while Micron Technology (MU.O) rose 1.7%.
Hard disk drives (HDDs) are spinning-disk storage devices used to hold large pools of data in cloud and enterprise systems. The biggest, newest models tend to command higher prices and margins.
Western Digital spun off its flash-memory business into Sandisk in February 2025, leaving the company focused on HDDs. In its latest quarterly report on Oct. 30, Western Digital said revenue rose 27% to $2.82 billion and adjusted, or non-GAAP, earnings were $1.78 per share. The company forecast fiscal second-quarter revenue of about $2.9 billion at the midpoint and adjusted earnings of about $1.88 per share. 2
Traders are watching for updates on pricing and shipment volumes for the company’s nearline drives — high-capacity HDDs sold into data centers — and for any change in ordering patterns from the largest cloud operators.
The stock’s 2025 run has raised the bar for the next set of results. Any sign that demand is stabilizing at lower levels or that pricing power is fading would likely ripple quickly through the shares.
For now, Western Digital is moving largely in step with the chip sector’s pullback, but the size of this year’s gains leaves little room for disappointment.
