SAN JOSE, California, May 9, 2026, 12:03 PDT
Western Digital Corp shares rose 3.5% on Friday to close at $480.00, after touching $483.66, as investors kept piling into data-storage names tied to the artificial intelligence buildout. The stock traded 7.9 million shares, and the company’s market value stood at about $165 billion.
The move matters because Western Digital is no longer the old two-part storage group. After the Sandisk separation, it reports as a hard disk drive, or HDD, company — the drives used to store large volumes of data in cloud and enterprise systems. A regulatory filing showed its single reportable segment is HDD.
That makes Western Digital a cleaner bet on AI storage demand at a time when the wider memory and storage supply chain is tight. Reuters reported on Friday that surging memory prices are already hitting Sony and Nintendo, with AI data-center demand constraining supply across consumer electronics and other tech hardware.
Western Digital also moved this week to clean up what remains of its Sandisk stake. The company said it entered exchange agreements with institutional investors to receive 1,865,801 Western Digital shares in exchange for 653,203 Sandisk shares, with settlement expected on May 7; it said it would still hold 1,038,681 Sandisk shares after the exchange.
The transaction is not a plain cash buyback. It is more a stock-for-stock step, using a highly valued former unit to pull in Western Digital shares and narrow the post-spinoff overhang.
The latest financial backdrop is strong. Western Digital last week reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of $3.337 billion, up 45% from a year earlier, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.72; it forecast fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $3.65 billion, plus or minus $100 million, and non-GAAP EPS of $3.25 at the midpoint. It also raised its quarterly dividend to 15 cents a share.
Chief Executive Irving Tan tied the demand to AI workloads. “Virtually every AI workload,” he said, creates data that is stored “persistently and cost-efficiently on HDDs.” Western Digital Corporation
Analysts have been chasing the rally. Cantor Fitzgerald raised its Western Digital price target to $660 from $500 and kept an overweight rating, citing stronger pricing, data-center demand and results that beat expectations, according to Investing.com.
The competitive read-through is still important. Reuters reported last week that Seagate’s strong forecast lifted storage stocks, including Western Digital, Micron and Sandisk, and that Morningstar analysts expected the AI buildout to support stronger pricing power for HDD makers through at least 2030.
In the adjacent memory trade, Business Insider reported on Saturday that Sandisk, Seagate, Western Digital and Micron have posted triple-digit gains this year. Roundhill Chief Executive Dave Mazza told the publication that memory chips are “the most supply-constrained layer” of the AI infrastructure buildout. Business Insider
But the risk is that expectations now outrun shipments and prices. Michael Ashley Schulman, partner at Cerity Partners, told Reuters after the latest storage earnings that Western Digital and Sandisk’s outlooks were “failing to provide the necessary ‘wow factor’” to sustain the pace of the rally; Western Digital’s own risk language also cites demand volatility, tariffs, supplier limits and competitive pricing as possible pressures. Reuters
Investors will get another public check on the story soon. Western Digital lists appearances at the J.P. Morgan technology conference on May 18, Bank of America’s technology conference on June 2 and Evercore’s TMT conference on June 3.
