New York, January 6, 2026, 19:30 EST — After-hours
Seagate Technology Holdings plc (STX.O) shares jumped nearly 14% on Tuesday and were last up 14% at $330.42 in after-hours trading, after touching $334.83 earlier in the session.
The surge shows how quickly investors are widening the AI trade from chipmakers to the hardware that stores and serves data for large models. With fourth-quarter earnings season days away, traders are leaning into names that could benefit if cloud and enterprise spending stays firm.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s next generation of chips was in “full production” and flagged a new layer of storage technology called “context memory storage.” Huang said the design delivered “a gigantic step up in performance” as Nvidia pushes to speed up chatbot responses to long questions; tokens are the basic units of text an AI system processes. 1
Seagate also rode a broader move in memory-linked stocks after warnings that supply is tightening as chipmakers divert output toward high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers. Samsung co-CEO TM Roh called the shortage “unprecedented,” and market researcher TrendForce said prices in some segments have more than doubled since February last year. 2
Seagate, which makes hard disk drives used for bulk storage in data centers, has pointed to AI workloads as a driver of demand as cloud firms expand hardware budgets. In October, the company forecast second-quarter revenue of $2.70 billion, plus or minus $100 million, and adjusted profit of about $2.75 per share, above analysts’ estimates, and CEO Dave Mosley cited growth driven by “new AI applications.” 3
Peer stocks moved in step: SanDisk jumped more than 27% and Western Digital rose 17%, while Micron gained about 10%, with all four stocks hitting record highs, a Reuters report said. “We’re going to have a very strong earnings season for Big Tech,” said Jed Ellerbroek, portfolio manager at Argent Capital, as investors watched for signs that data-center capital spending could rise again. 4
But the trade can turn fast. Storage demand is cyclical, and any sign that AI spending is slowing, or that customers are pulling forward orders and then pausing, can pressure pricing and inventories.
Next up is Seagate’s quarterly report, with the market looking for updates on data-center demand and pricing. Seagate has not confirmed the date, but MarketBeat estimates the next results on Jan. 20. 5
