The computing market is absolutely ablaze with AI-driven growth. Regardless of how sustainable it might be, companies are spending untold amounts of wealth on hardware, with most headlines revolving around GPUs. But the storage market is also under pressure, especially hard drive vendors who purportedly haven't done much to increase manufacturing capacity in a decade. TrendForce says lead times for high-capacity "nearline" hard drives have ballooned to over 52 weeks — more than a full year.
TredForce posted two articles on essentially the same topic today. One of them includes a letter from Western Digital to its customers warning of "unprecedented demand for every capacity in [its] portfolio," and stating that it is raising prices on all of its hard drives. WD says, of course, that this is "to support this growth and ensure continued excellence," but of course, the company will benefit from the bump to its margins and thus, profits.
