NEW YORK, Jan 2, 2026, 15:03 ET — Regular session
- Western Digital (WDC) rose about 8% to $186.30 in afternoon trading, after touching $187.53.
- Seagate gained about 4% and Micron climbed about 10%, while Sandisk jumped about 14%.
- Investors are watching next week’s U.S. jobs report and inflation data for clues on interest-rate cuts.
Western Digital shares rose about 8.1% to $186.30 by mid-afternoon on Friday, lifting with a broad move higher in data-storage and memory stocks. The stock traded between $176.00 and $187.53 and last showed volume of about 4.7 million shares.
The move keeps Western Digital in focus after a breakout year that made it the S&P 500’s best-performing stock in 2025, as investors gauge whether demand tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure can hold up.
The rally in storage names came as U.S. equities wavered in the first session of the new year, while chip-linked stocks held up better, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor index up 3.5%, Reuters reported.
Peers moved in the same direction. Seagate Technology rose about 4.1% and Micron Technology gained about 10.0%, while Sandisk — Western Digital’s former flash-memory business — jumped about 14.2%.
Western Digital completed the separation of its flash business in February 2025, leaving the company more concentrated in hard disk drives, which are widely used for high-capacity storage in cloud data centers.
In late October, Western Digital forecast second-quarter earnings above Wall Street estimates and raised its quarterly cash dividend by 25% to $0.125 per share, Reuters reported. “Western Digital continues to execute well in a strong demand environment driven by growth of data storage in the cloud,” CEO Irving Tan said in a statement at the time. Reuters
Investors.com said the sharp run in Western Digital and rival Seagate has been driven by demand for hard drives as AI-driven data center spending expands, though some analysts have flagged the risk of over-ordering — customers booking more than they need to secure supply — in a cyclical industry.
The same report said both companies are chasing higher “areal density,” the amount of data stored per square inch, and pointed to heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), a method that uses heat to write data at higher densities. Investors
In an Oct. 31 Reuters report, J.P. Morgan analysts said Western Digital had secured purchase orders extending through calendar 2026 with five of its largest customers, arguing buyers were unwilling to risk coming up short on storage capacity as AI-related demand rises.
The next major swing factor is macro data. Reuters said investors will be watching the U.S. employment report due Jan. 9 and the consumer price index report due Jan. 13, with markets sensitive to what the numbers imply for Federal Reserve policy.
For Western Digital, traders are also watching for signs that cloud customers keep ordering at today’s pace, and whether pricing holds up as the industry pushes new capacity and recording technologies.
After a steep 2025 run, the stock’s reaction function can be sharp: stronger demand signals tend to reinforce the AI-storage narrative, while any hint of demand pull-forward or pricing pressure can prompt fast profit-taking.
