New York, January 7, 2026, 16:54 EST — After-hours
- Western Digital shares were down about 9% after a record-setting jump a day earlier
- Nvidia’s CES message on faster AI systems rippled into storage and memory names
- Traders now watch Friday’s U.S. jobs report and early earnings-season capex signals
Western Digital Corp shares were down 8.9% at $199.88 in after-hours trading on Wednesday. The stock swung between $219.36 and $195.30 in the session.
The pullback followed a burst of buying on Tuesday that sent storage-linked names to fresh highs after Nvidia’s Jensen Huang outlined new AI hardware and a new layer of storage technology at CES in Las Vegas. Western Digital rose 17% on Tuesday, while flash-memory spinoff SanDisk jumped more than 27% and peers Seagate Technology and Micron Technology also rallied. “I think we’re going to have a very strong earnings season for Big Tech,” said Jed Ellerbroek, a portfolio manager at Argent Capital, pointing to expectations for higher capex, or capital spending. 1
On Wednesday, the broader mood turned choppier as investors digested softer U.S. labor data and positioned for Friday’s government payrolls report. “Investors have come into 2026 with a similar playbook to last year: Buy tech and forget about it,” said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive officer of Longbow Asset Management, as money rotated back toward AI-heavy stocks even as the S&P 500 finished lower. Memory and storage names, including Western Digital and Seagate, gave back some of Tuesday’s gains. 2
Huang’s CES keynote helped light the fuse. He said Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin chips are in “full production” and described a new storage layer called “context memory storage,” aimed at making chatbots respond faster during long questions and back-and-forth conversations. 3
In the storage group, Seagate was down 6.7% at $308.26, while SanDisk was up 1.2% at $353.56.
But the trade has a soft spot: it leans on the idea that AI buildouts keep accelerating and that tight supply and pricing persist. Any hint that cloud and enterprise buyers are pushing orders out, or that pricing is easing, can turn a crowded momentum bid into a fast selloff.
Western Digital completed the separation of its Flash business in February 2025, leaving the company more exposed to hard-disk demand from hyperscale cloud providers and data centers. That sharper profile is one reason the stock has become a quick-moving proxy for AI infrastructure spending. 4
Next up, traders will lean on Friday’s U.S. nonfarm payrolls report for a read on rates and risk appetite, while watching the coming wave of earnings updates for any reset in Big Tech capex plans that can ripple into storage orders.
