WD Unveils 100TB Roadmap, 4x HDD Performance Push to Power AI Infrastructure

Western Digital (now rebranded as WD) has unveiled a bold storage roadmap aimed squarely at CIOs and infrastructure leaders navigating the explosive growth of AI workloads. At its Innovation Day, the company detailed a multi-year strategy centered on capacity expansion, performance acceleration, power optimization, and hyperscale economics for enterprise customers.The announcements reflect how WD’s fundamental business transformation has enabled a new generation of storage technologies.

During its Innovation Day, WD showcased technologies that address the necessary customer requirements like reliability and economics, performance, power efficiency, and faster qualifications without customer business disruptions and will deliver them at scale.

The 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.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.

Capacity Innovation: Clear Path to 100TB+

WD announced that its 40TB UltraSMR ePMR HDD — the world’s highest capacity drive — is currently in hyperscale qualification, with volume production targeted for the second half of 2026. The company is advancing a dual-technology strategy:

• ePMR scaling to 60TB

• HAMR scaling to 100TB by 2029

• HAMR production ramp expected in 2027

Both technologies share a common architecture, allowing customers to transition on their own timelines without disruptive infrastructure changes — a critical factor for CIOs managing multi-petabyte environments.

HDD Performance Architecture: Closing the QLC Flash Gap

To address performance gaps between HDD and QLC flash — where flash carries a 6–10x cost premium — WD introduced two industry-first innovations:

• High Bandwidth Drive Technology: Enables simultaneous multi-head read/write operations, delivering up to 2x bandwidth today, with a roadmap to 8x gains. The technology is already with customers for validation.

• Dual Pivot Technology: A new actuator design delivering up to 2x sequential I/O within a 3.5-inch drive, without sacrificing capacity or requiring major software re-architecture. Drives using this design are expected in 2028.

Combined, these innovations aim to deliver 4x sequential I/O gains, allowing 100TB drives to maintain the same relative IO-per-terabyte ratio customers rely on today — reducing the need to expand SSD deployments as data scales.

Power-Optimized HDDs: Bridging the Gap Between Warm and Cold AI Data Tiers

AI training and inference workloads are generating massive volumes of cold but still rapidly accessible data. WD introduced power-optimized HDDs designed to bridge the gap between warm and cold storage tiers.

• Maintain sub-second access times

• Reduce power consumption and operational costs

• Trade minimal random I/O for higher capacity and efficiency.

Power-optimized drives are expected to be in customer qualification in 2027.

Platforms Expansion: Reducing Complexity to Improve Customer Time-to-Value

Recognizing that mid-scale enterprises (200+ PB environments) face hyperscale challenges without equivalent resources, WD is expanding its Platforms business.

• Simplify deployment of UltraSMR, ePMR, HAMR, and flash platforms

• Reduce qualification risk

• Accelerate time-to-production

• Deliver hyperscale-grade storage economics to enterprise customers

Over the past year, WD shifted toward multi-year customer partnerships, operational discipline that more than doubled gross profit year-over-year, and leadership renewal that accelerated decision-making. The company’s performance led to its inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 and ranking among top S&P 500 performers in 2025.

“With AI reshaping infrastructure requirements, we are reimagining the hard drive to meet demand for scale, performance, and efficiency,” said Irving Tan, CEO of WD.