New York, Feb 19, 2026, 15:18 EST — Regular session
- Seagate dropped 3.9% to $407.58, with shares swinging between $430.08 at the high and dipping to $402.20 on the low end.
- Investors are weighing a proposed $600 million exchangeable-notes swap, which also involves a share issuance.
- Seagate execs are set to make appearances on February 25 and again March 3.
Seagate Technology Holdings (STX) dropped 3.9% to $407.58 during Thursday afternoon, with shares seeing a swing of more than $27 between their intraday high and low.
The stock’s retreat comes after a sharp run-up, with investors having leaned on it as a stand-in for AI-driven data center hardware demand. Seagate, along with rival Western Digital, has rallied over 50% in 2026. Yet, quarterly filings indicated that some funds cut back holdings toward the end of last year.
Tech stocks lost a bit of steam Thursday, following a strong bounce in AI-related giants like Nvidia that pushed Wall Street higher the day before. “At a certain point, weakness in tech was bound to bring in the marginal buyer,” said Ross Mayfield, investment strategy analyst at Baird. Source
Seagate started out at $420.17, climbed as high as $430.08 in the opening stretch, then slipped down to $402.20, trade data showed. By midafternoon, roughly 2.5 million shares had changed hands.
Some of the churn shows up in Seagate’s capital structure. According to a Feb. 12 filing, the company struck a deal to swap $600 million worth of its 3.50% exchangeable senior notes due 2028 for approximately $599.2 million in cash. The rest comes in ordinary shares, with the share count determined by the stock’s volume-weighted average price over a single day. These exchangeable notes function as debt that can convert into equity, bumping up the total share count.
Western Digital dropped 3.1%. Nvidia slipped 0.6%. SanDisk, on the other hand, added around 3%. NetApp tacked on roughly 0.5%, with Pure Storage up 1.2%. The S&P 500 ETF declined close to 0.6%.
Mizuho’s Vijay Rakesh bumped up his price target for the stock to $475 from $440 on Tuesday, while keeping his “Outperform” rating unchanged, a report showed. Source
Seagate’s calendar is busy, with appearances slated for Bernstein’s TMT Forum on Feb. 25 and Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom event on March 3, according to the company.
The trade’s gotten crowded lately, with storage stocks now diverging. If data-center construction slows down or the note swap leads to more dilution than investors are betting on, the downside risk could get worse.
Investors are watching for news on the note exchange and hoping for updated demand commentary out of the upcoming conferences. For now, focus stays on whether the stock maintains its grip on the $402 level it tapped earlier Thursday.
