New York, March 4, 2026, 14:38 ET — Regular session
- Western Digital shares picked up roughly 6% in afternoon action, bouncing back alongside other storage names.
- Executives point to improved pricing per terabyte and say they’re seeing customers commit to longer-term cloud orders.
- Friday’s U.S. jobs data and the Fed’s March policy meeting are the next risk reset points on traders’ radar.
Western Digital Corp climbed 6.3% to $266.36 on Wednesday afternoon, lifted along with other storage and chip stocks. Seagate Technology advanced 6.8%, while Micron Technology was up 6.6%.
Markets clawed back some ground following Tuesday’s steep drop, triggered by a jump in oil as the Middle East conflict rattled investors and reignited inflation fears. Growth names took the first blow, with AI hardware—once the darling trade—acting like a levered bet all over again.
Wall Street held mostly steady Wednesday after The New York Times reported that Iranian operatives had contacted the U.S. about possible talks. President Donald Trump moved to calm oil jitters, aiming to steady nerves. “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. Reuters
Western Digital CEO Irving Tan, speaking at a Morgan Stanley event Tuesday, said one of the company’s five largest hyperscale customers has locked in orders stretching all the way to 2028. Two more have extended commitments out to 2027. “We have firm POs for all of calendar year 2026” from the top seven clients, Tan added, underscoring video’s demand for storage: “requires… somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times more” than text or still photos. Meanwhile, CFO Kris Sennesael told the same audience Western Digital anticipates “mid to high single-digits” growth in average selling price per terabyte through 2026. Investing
Any whiff of over-ordering in the cloud supply chain tends to spook traders—memories linger from those years when storage prices collapsed as soon as supply picked up. Longer-term orders and chatter about “flat to slightly up” pricing offer some reassurance. Still, the cycle remains intact.
Western Digital, which spun off its Flash unit into Sandisk back in February 2025, is back to concentrating on hard disk drives. The company’s most recent guidance for fiscal Q3 revenue landed at around $3.2 billion. It has also set a $0.125 per share cash dividend, payable March 18, for shareholders registered as of March 5’s close.
Still, the risk remains on the table. Should cloud budgets pull back, customers might dial down shipments despite signing on for longer deals. Storage vendors, for their part, have often stumbled when it comes to forecasting demand shifts at inflection points.
Coming up, investors will have to navigate a couple of major macro hurdles: the U.S. jobs report lands Friday, with the Fed meeting set for March 17-18. Both can rejigger bets on rate cuts, and that can easily flip sentiment toward the momentum trades driving storage names lately.
