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We used to take ordinary external hard drives for granted, but soon it will be almost impossible to buy them in retail stores. This is due to a sudden surge in demand from Western Digital’s key customers. Despite the fact that a decade ago, Crider’s Law predicted the demise of HDDs in favor of SSDs, hard drives are experiencing a real renaissance. This unexpected comeback is driven by both new discoveries in the physics of magnetism and the critical need for storage capacity for AI development. However, for the average consumer, this story, as with the shortage of video cards or RAM, does not bode well.
The artificial intelligence market is absorbing resources at such a fast pace that other buyers are left with nothing. Today, Western Digital is repeating the path of NVIDIA last year. During its recent second-quarter report to shareholders, CEO Irving Tan said that all HDD production capacity is effectively sold out for the entire 2026 calendar year.
The company already has firm orders from its seven largest customers. This means that Western Digital’s new drives are unlikely to be available for sale before 2027. Moreover, agreements with two major buyers are scheduled to run until 2027, and another until 2028.
The main factor behind this collapse was data centers. Since HDDs provide better payback and storage density than SSDs, Western Digital’s cloud services are based exclusively on this technology. Currently, corporate customer service brings the company 89% of its total revenue. But the share of regular retail customers is only 5%, making our needs unimportant to the giant’s business strategy.
While it’s annoying to see the last way to avoid another paid subscription disappear from your shopping cart, it makes financial sense for Western Digital and its competitors. In the current economic model, your private archives or downloaded videos will always lose out to corporations that are exchanging huge amounts of capital to keep the AI bubble alive.
Users will either have to free up space on their old disks as soon as possible, or hope that the vision of a future built solely on artificial intelligence will change someday.
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