Rebranded as WD, the company unveils a 100TB+ HDD roadmap, new performance- and power-optimized innovations, and an intelligent platform solution to accelerate AI-scale storage deployment
Western Digital (Nasdaq: WDC) recently unveiled a new customer-centric storage roadmap, including the new world’s highest 40TB UltraSMR ePMR HDD, currently in hyperscale qualification with volume production planned for the second half of 2026. The company also unveiled breakthrough innovations including High Bandwidth Drive technology delivering 2x bandwidth, Dual Pivot design enabling up to 2x I/O performance, and power-optimized HDDs using 20% less power – all addressing the explosive data growth driven by AI workloads.
As AI adoption accelerates across industries, demand for scalable, cost-efficient storage continues to rise. WD’s latest innovations address capacity, performance, power efficiency, and simplified deployment — without disrupting existing infrastructure. WD's accelerated roadmap also extends ePMR to 60TB aby leveraging HAMR innovations without increasing power consumption, while HAMR will scale to 100TB by 2029. These announcements represent a new era for WD, building on the strategic moves the company completed over the past year: shifting to long-term customer partnerships based on multi-year commitments; achieving operational excellence through disciplined execution that doubled gross profit year-over-year; and inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 and ranking among top S&P 500 performers in 2025. In addition, a new financial model was shared to reflect the company’s refreshed view for the next 3 to 5 years. The new model is available at investor.wdc.com.
The company, now known as WD, also unveiled updated branding that reflects its transformation into an essential storage infrastructure provider for the AI-driven data economy.
Capacity Innovation: Clear Path to 100TB+
With its dual ePMR and HAMR technology leadership approach, WD announced that the world's highest capacity 40TB UltraSMR ePMR HDD is in hyperscale qualification with volume production planned for the second half of 2026. WD HAMR HDD qualification is also underway with ramp production in 2027. Hyperscalers and enterprises can adopt either technology on their own timelines with predictable capacity planning and seamless scaling.
HDD Performance Architecture: Closing the QLC Flash Gap
Addressing the performance demands of AI workloads, WD introduced two industry-first innovation. The High Bandwidth Drive Technology enables simultaneous reading and writing from multiple heads, delivering up to 2x bandwidth without power penalties and pathing the way to 8x bandwidth gains. The Dual Pivot Technology adds independently operating actuators, delivering up to 2x sequential I/O gain while maintaining higher capacity within the standard 3.5-inch form factor.
High Bandwidth Drive Technology is already with customers today. HDDs with Dual Pivot Technology are currently in the lab and will become available in 2028.
Power-Optimized HDDs: Bridging the Gap Between Warm and Cold AI Data Tiers
WD's power-optimized HDDs will reduce power consumption, and therefore customer operating costs, while maintaining a sub-second access storage tier with the same 3.5-inch form factor customers use today. This innovation shrinks the gap between warm and cold storage tiers, enabling customers to reduce TCO and improve sustainability for AI-scale data. Power-optimized drives are expected to be in customer qualification in 2027.
Platforms Expansion: Reducing Complexity to Improve Customer Time-to-Value
WD announced the expansion of its Platforms business to extend hyperscale storage economics to a broader customer. This includes an intelligent software layer, through an open API, expected to launch in 2027, enabling companies at 200+ petabyte scale to achieve the same storage efficiency and economics that hyperscalers enjoy today.
Commenting on the occasion, Owais Mohammed, Sales Director India, Middle East, and Africa, Western Digital said, “Today, WD HDDs are even more uniquely positioned to meet the capacity, performance, and efficiency demands by new AI workloads. In the Zettabyte age, where data creation and consumption is showing an unprecedented growth, storage forms the backbone of the AI-driven data economy. Without high-capacity HDDs, trainings and large AI models couldn‘t process and store the massive volumes of information consumed and generated economically at scale.
As India emerges as one of the key players in the global AI and data-centre ecosystem, data growth is accelerating rapidly across cloud platforms, enterprises, and digital services. This demand spans hyperscale environments as well as SMBs and surveillance-led use cases. Our focus is on supporting this growth with scalable, reliable HDD-based storage and platforms that enable India’s expanding AI and data-centre infrastructure to grow sustainably and efficiently.”
For the full WD Innovation Day 2026 replay and presentation, visit: https://investor.wdc.com/
