Western Digital (WDC) perpetual market

Western Digital is one of the world's largest makers of data storage, best known for hard disk drives, the spinning magnetic drives that store vast amounts of data cheaply. Founded in 1970, it grew into a storage giant through decades of competition and consolidation, and for years it also produced flash-based storage after acquiring SanDisk in 2016. In 2025 Western Digital spun off that flash memory business, refocusing itself on hard disk drives. That leaves it concentrated on the high-capacity drives that remain the backbone of mass data storage in cloud and enterprise data centers, where the sheer volume of data generated, including by artificial intelligence applications, continues to grow. Western Digital's business is cyclical, tied to demand from cloud providers and enterprises and to storage pricing. As a leading supplier of the drives that warehouse the world's data, it is viewed as a play on long-term growth in data creation and storage.