With Western Digital and Seagate, two of the three remaining hard drive manufacturers worldwide have confirmed that they have already sold their production quotas for 2026 completely or almost completely. The situation is likely to be similar for Toshiba.
The statements come from the company CEOs in the analyst conferences on the latest business reports. They thus confirm speculation from September 2025. And there are already initial agreements for the year 2026. They largely come from hyperscalers who want hard drives for their AI data centers, for example to store training data on them. These include Amazon (AWS), Google, Microsoft (Azure), Meta, and OpenAI.
What the CEOs say
Western Digital CEO Tiang Yew Tan said: "We're pretty much sold out for calendar year 2026. We have firm purchase orders with our top seven customers through calendar year 2026. We also have in place robust commercial agreements with three of our top five customers, two through calendar year 2027 and one through calendar year 2028."
Seagate CEO William Mosley explained: "Our nearline capacity is fully allocated through calendar year 2026, and we expect to begin accepting orders for the first half of calendar year 2027 in the coming months. Further out, demand visibility is strengthening based on the long-term agreements in place with major cloud customers through calendar 2027. Additionally, multiple cloud customers are discussing their demand growth projections for calendar 2028, underscoring that supply assurance remains their highest priority."
By nearline, Seagate understands its HDD offering with a server focus. Some of these models also spill over into retail. According to the business report, nearline recently accounted for 87 percent of Seagate's hard drive sales. The division is increasingly displacing the remaining offerings. A year earlier, nearline was still at 83 percent.
No Production Expansion for Now
According to Mosley, Seagate is not expanding its production capacities for now. Growth is to come only from higher-capacity hard drives, not from additional unit numbers.
CFO Gianluca Romano added: "If in a quarter, we can produce a little bit more, of course, we will sell those exabytes in the open market at a good profitability. But I would say the vast, vast majority of the volume is already allocated."
Toshiba has not been listed on the stock exchange since 2023. As a result, only rudimentary financial information is publicly available. The company no longer provides outlooks like its competitors.
All three HDD manufacturers have recently increased sales and profits. Western Digital's revenue, for example, increased by 25 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared to the same period last year, to three billion US dollars. Operating profit rose by 62 percent to 908 million US dollars. A higher gross margin (46.1 instead of 38.4 percent) underscores that the manufacturer is charging higher prices.
HDD and SSD Prices are Rising
In German retail, HDD prices have risen by about 20 to 50 percent compared to mid-2025. A shortage of HDDs for data centers also affects SSDs: hyperscalers are buying high-capacity SSDs as an alternative. Manufacturers are therefore shifting their production, which leads to price increases in retail.
Many models with up to two terabytes of storage have become about 50 percent pricier since summer 2025, for example in the case of Samsung. Smaller SSD manufacturers without their own memory production are hit harder – price increases of a factor of 2 to 3 are observed here, for example with Kingston, Lexar, and Patriot.
Western Digital SSDs are currently disappearing from the market because the models will continue to run under new SanDisk names in the future. Both companies separated from each other in 2025.
(mma)