[News] WD’s 2026 Production Fully Booked; LTAs Reportedly Extend to 2028-29 with Supply Talks to 2030

As SanDisk—spun off from Western Digital a year ago—posted strong earnings and extended order visibility, WD said it has secured multiple long-term agreements as well, with ongoing customer talks about contract extensions and even supply inquiries stretching out to 2030, according to Barron’s and an Investing.com earnings call transcript.

CFO Kris Sennesael told Barron’s that “all boats are rising” in data and memory. He explained that as AI workloads shift from model training to inference, the volume of generated data is rising sharply. To deliver inference at scale while keeping costs efficient, much of this new data will ultimately be stored on hard drives, with hyperscale operators carefully managing its movement across SSDs, HDDs, and other storage tiers, he said.

Against this backdrop, CEO Erving Tan, as per Investing.com, noted that WD has secured firm purchase commitments from its top seven customers through 2026. In addition, the company has signed solid commercial agreements with three of its top five customers—two extending through 2027 and another through 2028, he added.

Sennesael, according to Investing.com, said WD’s production capacity for 2026 is effectively fully booked. He added that discussions are underway with additional customers about pushing contracts into 2028 or 2029, while some clients have gone as far as asking about supply availability in 2030. As per the report, Sennesael noted that these long-term deals are structured around committed exabyte volumes and pricing.

Strong Margin Outlook

Notably, at its Innovation Day on February 3, WD projected more than 20% annual revenue growth over the next three to five years, with gross margins above 50%, according to Investor’s Business Daily.

CEO Irving Tan, as per Forbes, highlighted the central role of hard-disk drives, which store roughly 80% of data in hyperscale cloud environments. As noted by Investor’s Business Daily, once a cyclical industry prone to boom-and-bust swings, hard-disk drives are now being driven by AI, which WD sees as a stable, long-term growth engine.

Thus, the report notes that WD and rival Seagate are prioritizing higher drive density over simply increasing unit capacity. At the Innovation Day, WD unveiled a roadmap aiming for a 100TB hard drive by 2029, powered by HAMR—heat-assisted magnetic recording—a technology designed to dramatically expand HDD capacity, according to Forbes.

Last week, the company posted a blockbuster Q2 FY2026, with net income soaring 210% to $1.8 billion, up from $594 million a year earlier. Revenue for the quarter climbed 25% year-over-year to $3.017 billion, while gross margin stood at 45.7%.

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(Photo credit: WD’s Facebook)