NEW YORK, March 10, 2026, 10:59 EDT
Western Digital shares jumped nearly 7% on Tuesday, outrunning the broader market as investors piled back into AI-linked storage names. At 10:44 a.m. ET, the stock traded at $279.59, up 6.7%, while Seagate, Micron and Sandisk were also higher and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF showed only a modest gain.
Fresh forecasts pointed to even heavier AI infrastructure spending, the backdrop that has driven Western Digital’s rally. Citigroup raised its 2026-2030 global AI capital-spending forecast to $8.9 trillion from $8 trillion and said big cloud companies Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are expected to spend more than $630 billion this year. 1
Deutsche Bank added to the shift in tone, upgrading U.S. and European technology sectors to “neutral” from “underweight” and saying no major company it tracks expects a negative revenue hit from AI in 2026. That mattered because markets have been jerking around for days on worries over the U.S.-Iran conflict and the inflation risk from higher energy costs. 2
Western Digital’s own numbers have reinforced that theme. Chief Financial Officer Kris Sennesael said in January that “our business continues to strengthen” as the company guided to about $3.2 billion in March-quarter revenue after second-quarter sales rose 25% to $3.02 billion. Hard disk drives, or HDDs – lower-cost devices used to store huge volumes of data – are central to cloud AI systems, while solid-state drives, or SSDs, handle faster workloads but cost more. 3
The company has also been cleaning up its balance sheet and sharpening its focus. Reuters reported on Feb. 18 that Western Digital planned to raise $3.17 billion by selling part of its Sandisk stake after the spinoff, leaving about 1.7 million Sandisk shares worth nearly $1 billion and targeting debt that stood at $4.69 billion in January. 4
Chief Executive Irving Tan has been just as direct about the demand backdrop. On the January earnings call, he said “the demand to store it is expanding at a rapid rate” as AI and cloud growth push customers toward denser storage. 5
At Morgan Stanley’s conference last week, Tan pointed to AI-generated video and industrial AI uses such as autonomous vehicles as fresh drivers of storage demand. Investors Business Daily said the presentation also highlighted Western Digital’s long-term purchase orders with large cloud customers through 2028. 6
Analysts have mostly stayed constructive. Investors Business Daily reported last month that Morgan Stanley’s Erik Woodring called Western Digital his “top pick,” while Cantor Fitzgerald said it expected the company to exit the March quarter debt-free, with room for extra dividends or buybacks. 7
But the trade still looks crowded. BTIG strategist Jonathan Krinsky said this week that the group looked “very vulnerable” to a deeper pullback and singled out Sandisk, Micron, Western Digital and Seagate as “precarious.” 8
Markets were still choppy underneath Tuesday’s bounce. Reuters reported earlier in the session that the S&P 500 and Nasdaq were lower as investors weighed signs the U.S.-Iran conflict could intensify, even as technology remained the best-performing S&P sector this month and helped cap losses. 9
