Western Digital Chief Executive Officer Irving Tan said that the company has already sold out of hard drives for 2026. Tan confirmed this during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call, where, according to the transcript shared by Investing.com, he also confirmed that there are already some long-term agreements (LTAs) in place for the next couple of years.
“As we highlighted, we’re pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers,” the executive said. “And we’ve also established LTAs with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028. Obviously, these LTAs have a combination of volume of exabytes and price.” This announcement is on track with the report from late last year that hard drives are on backorder for two years due to massive data center demand.
PC hardware shortages are only getting worse as the AI race continues. What started as a memory and storage chip shortage has soon spread into GPUs and is now hitting hard drives. Most consumers won’t feel the HDD pinch as it’s mostly a niche product in recent years, but we’re afraid that other parts, components, and product categories are going to follow suit with the price increases and supply shortages in the coming months.
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