New York, January 6, 2026, 11:52 EST — Regular session
- Western Digital shares up 13.8% at $213.79 in late morning trading.
- SanDisk up 23.8%, Seagate up 11.7% and Micron up 6.3% as storage and memory stocks rally.
- Next catalysts: Samsung’s preliminary earnings on Jan. 8 and SK Hynix results on Jan. 22.
Western Digital Corp (WDC) shares rose 13.8% to $213.79 by 11:52 a.m. ET on Tuesday, after touching an intraday high of $215.33. The stock traded as low as $188.09 earlier in the session.
The data-storage maker climbed with a broader rally in memory and storage stocks, led by SanDisk, which jumped to a record high. Reuters tracking showed peers Micron and Western Digital were also higher in early trade as chipmakers lifted the tech sector. 1
The rally matters because storage names are increasingly treated as a read-through on AI infrastructure buildouts. More “inference” — when trained AI models generate answers for users — means more data to store and move, and demand can tighten supply quickly. Traders are also positioning ahead of U.S. economic releases later this week that can swing rate expectations and risk appetite.
At CES in Las Vegas on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the chipmaker’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform is in “full production” and highlighted a new layer of storage technology it calls “context memory storage.” Huang said the feature is designed to help chatbots respond faster to long questions and conversations. 2
Optimism has also been fed by signs the memory market is tight. Samsung co-CEO TM Roh called the shortage “unprecedented” in an interview with Reuters, as makers shift capacity toward high-bandwidth memory, a faster form of DRAM used in AI servers. Market-research firm TrendForce has said prices in some segments have more than doubled since February last year. 3
SanDisk was up 23.8% and Seagate gained 11.7%, while Micron rose 6.3% and Nvidia was up less than 1%. The split showed investors leaning into the parts of the AI hardware trade most exposed to higher memory and storage content per server.
Western Digital last guided for fiscal second-quarter revenue of $2.9 billion, plus or minus $100 million, and raised its quarterly cash dividend 25% to 12.5 cents per share, citing higher demand as cloud providers add data-center capacity. CEO Irving Tan said the firm was “executing well in a strong demand environment driven by growth of data storage in the cloud.”
But the trade rests on pricing power and sustained cloud spending, and the storage cycle can turn fast once supply catches up. Any hint that customers are digesting inventories, or that financing costs are rising, could clip expectations that have pushed the group higher.
