NEW YORK, January 8, 2026, 18:52 EST — After-hours
- Western Digital shares fell about 6% on Thursday as storage stocks gave back a CES-fueled surge.
- The stock had jumped 17% on Tuesday after Nvidia’s CES remarks stirred fresh AI-linked demand talk.
- Traders are watching Friday’s U.S. jobs report and Western Digital’s next earnings update for demand signals.
Western Digital (WDC.O) shares were down 6.1% at $187.68 in after-hours trading on Thursday, after swinging between $180.70 and $201.78 during the session. Seagate Technology (STX.O) fell 7.7%, while SanDisk (SNDK.O) and Micron Technology (MU.O) slid 5.3% and 3.7%, respectively.
The two-day pullback has tested a trade that ran hot at the start of the year, with investors treating storage and memory names as spillover plays on artificial intelligence infrastructure spending. “While AI is still hot, there are going to be winners and losers,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, as traders turned to Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report for December. Reuters
Western Digital ripped higher earlier in the week after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, sketched out a new storage layer tied to its next chips. “I think we’re going to have a very strong earnings season for Big Tech,” Jed Ellerbroek, a portfolio manager at Argent Capital, told Reuters, pointing to the likelihood of higher capital spending, or capex. Reuters
The mood shifted quickly. Western Digital fell almost 9% on Wednesday as investors locked in gains across memory and storage names that had just hit record highs.
Western Digital now focuses on hard-disk drives after it separated its flash business into SanDisk in February 2025, the company said. In its last earnings report in October, CEO Irving Tan pointed to cloud-driven demand, while CFO Kris Sennesael forecast fiscal second-quarter revenue of about $2.9 billion, plus or minus $100 million, with non-GAAP gross margin of 44% to 45%.
But the downside case is sitting in plain sight: storage is still a pricing-and-capacity business, and sharp moves can cut both ways if investors decide the AI buildout is getting ahead of near-term returns. Morningstar analyst William Kerwin has cautioned that solid-state drive pricing strength could normalize over the next few years.
Next up is Western Digital’s quarterly report, which Investing.com lists for Jan. 22.
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