Western Digital Announces Vision and Strategy for the Future at Investor Day 2025
Western Digital, at Investor Day 2025,
announced its vision and strategy for the future as the planned separation of
the company's Flash business nears its expected completion on February 21,
2025.
CEO Designate Irving Tan reinforced Western Digital's leadership in delivering
world-class, sustainable storage solutions at scale. With a deep legacy in HDD
technology and innovation, Western Digital remains the trusted partner for the
world's largest hyperscalers, CSPs and OEMs, delivering cutting-edge solutions
at the right time with low total cost of ownership (TCO). From industry-leading
ePMR CMR HDDs and UltraSMR technology, to HAMR and beyond, Western Digital
continues to drive innovation across its portfolio, creating unmatched
long-term value for its customers.
Tan shared Western Digital's projection on how the proliferation of AI will
impact the HDD industry and the value of data stored. As companies generate and
store more data, growing use cases such as text-to-image GenAI workloads,
text-to-video applications and a rising demand for massive data lakes to fuel
AI models are expected to increase HDD exabyte shipments at a 23 percent CAGR
from 2024 to 2028. Western Digital remains steadfast in addressing the
ever-growing data demands of the cloud and enterprise markets, delivering the
scalability, TCO and sustainability needed to store the majority of the world's
generated data, which is expected to grow 3x between 2023 and 2028.
To meet this demand today and into the future, Tan announced that the company's
HAMR development is accelerating as testing is underway with two major
hyperscale customers. With the company's differentiated portfolio of scalable
capacity across ePMR and UltraSMR technologies, and with UltraSMR gains
extending to HAMR, Western Digital is enabling its customers to plan long-term,
while leveraging expanding capacity points available today. This helps ensure a
predictable, scalable economic transition for customers, while achieving
maximum value as their data center environments evolve.
"The future holds tremendous opportunity, and Western Digital is
well-positioned to be the leader in data storage as we meet our customers'
storage needs today and into the future," said Tan. "We are not just
advancing the future of HDD - we're unleashing the power and value of data for
enterprise and cloud customers worldwide."
The company's new strategic approach underscores Western Digital's dedication
to meeting customer demands today, while positioning for future growth. In
support, Tan shared that the team's expertise and intellectual property across
physics, material sciences and manufacturing capability is being applied to
exploring new growth opportunities in areas such as servo-mechanics, magnetics
and systems design.
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