New York, March 4, 2026, 14:38 ET — Regular session
- Western Digital shares rise about 6% in afternoon trading, rebounding with storage peers
- Executives cite longer cloud customer order visibility and firmer price outlook per terabyte
- Traders watch Friday’s U.S. jobs report and the Fed’s March policy meeting for the next risk reset
Western Digital Corp shares rose 6.3% to $266.36 in afternoon trading on Wednesday, tracking a bounce across storage and chip names. Seagate Technology gained 6.8% and Micron Technology added 6.6%.
The recovery came after a sharp selloff on Tuesday, when the Middle East conflict pushed oil prices higher and revived worries about inflation sticking around. That kind of tape usually hits growth stocks first, and AI-linked hardware has been trading like high beta again. 1
Wall Street steadied on Wednesday after a New York Times report said Iranian operatives had reached out to the United States about talks, while President Donald Trump sought to reassure markets about oil. “Until people think what’s happening in the Middle East will cause a recession, they’re giving stocks the benefit of the doubt,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Northlight Asset Management. 2
In a Morgan Stanley conference appearance on Tuesday, Western Digital Chief Executive Irving Tan said one of the company’s top five hyperscalers — the biggest cloud data-center operators — has placed orders through calendar 2028, with two more extending to 2027. “We have firm POs for all of calendar year 2026” for its top seven customers, he said, and argued that video “requires… somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times more” storage than text and still images. CFO Kris Sennesael told the conference the company expects “mid to high single-digits” growth in average selling price per terabyte — the average price per unit of storage — through calendar 2026. 3
Traders have been sensitive to any hint of over-ordering in the cloud supply chain, after years when storage pricing broke quickly once supply loosened. Longer purchase orders and talk of “flat to slightly up” pricing help, but they do not erase the cycle.
Western Digital, now focused on hard disk drives after separating its Flash business into Sandisk in February 2025, last forecast fiscal third-quarter revenue of about $3.2 billion. It also declared a $0.125 per share cash dividend payable March 18 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on March 5. 4
But the downside case has not gone away. If cloud spending cools, customers can still slow shipments even with longer agreements, and storage suppliers have a long history of misreading demand at the turn.
Investors’ next near-term pressure test is macro: the U.S. government’s monthly employment report is due Friday, and the Federal Reserve meets March 17-18. Those events can shift rate-cut expectations and, with them, the appetite for the kind of momentum trade that has been moving storage stocks day to day. 5
