NEW YORK, December 30, 2025, 15:01 ET — Regular session
Seagate Technology Holdings plc shares were down 0.2% at $280.77 in afternoon trading on Tuesday, drifting after a year when the hard-drive maker became a marquee bet on AI-linked data-center spending. The stock has traded between $280.19 and $284.09 so far in the session, with about 694,000 shares changing hands.
The soft patch matters because Seagate has been one of 2025’s standout infrastructure winners, leaving the stock more sensitive to shifts in sentiment around cloud budgets, storage pricing and the durability of the AI spending cycle.
Investors are also closing the books on 2025, a period when large year-to-date gains can sharpen profit-taking and rebalancing, even without new company news.
Seagate’s closest U.S. hard-disk drive peer, Western Digital, fell about 1.6% on Tuesday, while the Nasdaq 100-tracking Invesco QQQ ETF and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF were both little changed.
A Barron’s feature published Monday put Seagate and Western Digital in the spotlight as “surprise” AI winners, saying both stocks have been among the S&P 500’s top performers in 2025. Seagate CEO Dave Mosley told the magazine that AI is “fundamentally reshaping hard drive demand.” 1
Seagate makes hard disk drives, or HDDs — the spinning-disk storage devices used for mass-capacity storage at hyperscale data centers and public clouds. It also sells solid state drives, or SSDs, which store data on chips and typically run faster but can cost more per unit of storage. 2
That cost gap has kept HDDs central to “archive” workloads, where companies store huge data sets cheaply for later retrieval — a use case that has grown alongside generative AI training and deployment.
Seagate’s next earnings report is expected to be the next hard catalyst for the shares, with investors looking for confirmation that high-capacity enterprise-drive demand is translating into sustained pricing power and margins.
In October, Seagate forecast second-quarter revenue of $2.70 billion, plus or minus $100 million, and adjusted profit of $2.75 per share, above analysts’ expectations, citing strong demand tied to AI infrastructure spending by cloud providers. 3
Income investors have another near-term item on the calendar: Seagate’s investor relations site shows a $0.74-per-share quarterly cash dividend payable on Jan. 9 to shareholders of record as of Dec. 24. 4
Nasdaq lists Jan. 20 as an estimated date for Seagate’s next earnings report. Traders will be watching for any update on the company’s outlook and management commentary on customer qualification cycles and 2026 demand. 5
For now, STX is likely to keep trading as a read-through on the “picks-and-shovels” side of the AI buildout — a market where the next set of results, not last year’s rally, is set to dictate the next move.
