New York, January 8, 2026, 15:04 EST — Regular session
Western Digital Corp shares were down 7.6% at $184.75 in afternoon trading on Thursday, after swinging between $180.70 and $201.78 earlier in the session. About 9.3 million shares had changed hands.
The drop fits a broader pullback in AI-linked memory and storage names that had sprinted higher at the start of the year, leaving the market quick to punish any wobble. In a Reuters report, B. Riley Wealth chief market strategist Art Hogan called AI “a ‘show me’ sector” as investors weigh who can turn big spending into returns, with Friday’s U.S. payrolls report in focus. Reuters
The whipsaw started at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked up a new layer of storage technology, sparking a rush into the group. Western Digital jumped 17% on Tuesday, with SanDisk, Seagate Technology and Micron also notching record highs, Reuters reported.
By Wednesday the trade had flipped, with Western Digital down almost 9% and Seagate off 6.7% as the group gave back a chunk of its gains, according to Reuters. Longbow Asset Management chief executive Jake Dollarhide summed up the mood as: “Buy tech and forget about it.” Reuters
For Western Digital, the next hard catalyst is earnings, when investors will look for numbers that justify the start-of-year repricing. The company has not confirmed a date, but MarketBeat estimates results on Feb. 4 after the close based on past reporting patterns, and points to the last company-issued outlook from Oct. 30 that forecast second-quarter earnings per share — profit per share — of $1.73 to $2.03 on revenue of $2.8 billion to $3.0 billion.
On the chart, $200 has become a level the stock needs to win back to settle nerves. The $180 area is now the near-term line traders are watching after Thursday’s lows.
But the risk cuts the other way too. If the AI build-out translates into steadier orders and pricing, the pullback can look like plain profit-taking; if demand turns patchy, the sector can hand back more of the early gains in a hurry.
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