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The San Jose-based company manufactures hard disk drives and offers data-storage products and services. In May, the company announced the launch of SanDisk Professional, a brand aimed at content creators.

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Western Digital develops and manufactures data storage devices like hard drives and external drives.

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Founded in Silicon Valley at the dawn of the computer age, Western Digital is one of the world’s largest producers of hard disk drives used for data storage. The company’s portfolio of magnetic hard drives includes products designed for personal computing and for the data centers that power today’s cloud services. Western Digital spun out its flash memory business in February 2025, creating a separate publicly traded company under the SanDisk brand.

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Western Digital (WDC): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Western Digital

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Good afternoon, and welcome to Western Digital's fourth quarter fiscal 2026 conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Ambrish Srivastava, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Joining me today are Irving Tan, WD's Chief Executive Officer, and Kris Sennesael, WD's Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements based on management's current assumptions and expectations, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements include expectations for our product portfolio, our business plans and performance, ongoing market trends, and our future financial results. We assume no obligation to update these statements. Please refer to our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our other filings with the SEC for more information on the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. In our prepared remarks, our comments will be related to non-GAAP results on a continuing operations basis unless stated otherwise.

Reconciliations between the non-GAAP and comparable GAAP financial measures are included in the press release and other materials that are being posted in the investor relations section of our website at investor.wdc.com. Lastly, I want to note that when we refer to we, us, our, or similar terms, we are referring only to Western Digital as a company and not speaking on behalf of the industry. I will now turn the call over to Irving for introductory remarks. Irving?

Thanks, Ambrish. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Let me begin by reflecting on our first full fiscal year of WD as a focused pure-play HDD company. We drove strong year-over-year revenue growth of 36% while expanding our gross and operating margins significantly. We doubled EPS, generated $3.5 billion in free cash flow, and strengthened our balance sheet to a net positive cash position while continuing to make significant capital returns to shareholders. These strong financial results are an outcome of meeting our customers' growing storage demand by focusing on innovation and driving operational excellence across the global WD organization. We enter fiscal year 2027 with robust customer demand, increased visibility, and continued confidence in the durability of demand, as well as our ability to service this demand with our industry-leading products and technology roadmap.

Demand for storage is being driven both by AI as well as by core cloud services. Within the AI infrastructure market, there is a key dynamic taking shape. While compute cycles can be reused, data compounds. Training and inference workloads share and reuse compute resources over time. Yet the data generated by these workloads, including model inputs, outputs, logs, and retained context, continues to accumulate. As AI usage scales, this creates a growing need for storage infrastructure capable of economically storing and managing these massive data sets. The inflection we have discussed in the past, from AI training to inference to agentic AI, has only become more pronounced. Training models create significant initial data requirements, but inference generates and retains data continuously.

Today, the largest AI platforms process tens of billions of tokens per minute and billions of prompts per day, creating a rapidly expanding body of data that must be stored, managed, and accessed over time. Recent disclosures show token volumes growing severalfold year-over-year, underscoring the pace at which inference is scaling. Meanwhile, AI is moving rapidly from merely answering questions to agentic AI that does the work, coordinating tasks, accessing data, and operating continuously across multi-step workflows. This transition creates a fundamentally more data-intensive workload and one that is increasingly persistent rather than transient. The storage implications are significant. Agents generate data at every step of a workflow, increasing both the volume of data created and the amount that must be stored over time. This is why we continue to view agentic AI as a structural and step function driver of capacity-oriented storage demand.

Beyond inference and agentic AI, we are also seeing the emergence of physical AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and industrial automation systems and humanoids, where the volume of real-world data needed to train these systems is insufficient, thereby requiring the generation and storage of synthetic data sets, creating another driver of storage demand. Infrastructure investment is important, but it's only the beginning. Training creates the initial data foundation. Inference generates data continuously. Agentic systems multiply the volume and frequency of that data. Physical AI accelerates the cycle further. Together, these trends create a more durable demand environment for data storage, driven not just by building AI infrastructure, but by the continuous creation and retention of data once that infrastructure is deployed. As AI workloads move from deployment to sustained use, storage demand becomes less about the one-time infrastructure build cycle and more about the compounding of data.

That is the underlying secular demand growth driver for our business. Today, roughly 80% of data stored in a hyperscale data center resides on hard disk drives. That is likely to continue. That reflects what HDDs do exceptionally well, delivering the scale, economics, and power efficiency required for long retention, large-scale data storage. Let me now turn to why these secular growth drivers play to WD's strengths. WD's robust technology roadmap is based on the industry-leading areal density per platter, with a focus on innovation to meet our customers' capacity needs at scale, along with our growing ability to meet their requirements by providing cost-effective storage solutions in additional layers of the AI storage stack. We are on track to ship our 44 terabyte HAMR product in the first half of calendar 2027.

Customer feedback on the qualification process continues to be very positive, with the capacity, performance, and reliability of our drives exceeding customer expectations. For our next generation 40 terabyte ePMR drives, we commenced shipments in our June quarter, and are now entering volume production with two customers. We are currently ramping our UltraSMR technology with a third major customer. We expect that UltraSMR will make up around 60% of our nearline exabyte shipments as we exit fiscal 2027. Since our last update, we've continued to broaden our customer engagement and qualification pipeline with additional hyperscale and cloud customers advancing through qualification and deployment planning. Beyond capacity, we are also extending innovation into new layers of the AI storage stack. We are making progress on improving drive performance with our high bandwidth drives and are now sampling with five customers.

We are targeting up to eight times the throughput of today's drives without the corresponding increase in power draw. Exactly the kind of performance AI workloads require. In closing, the opportunity in front of us is real, and at WD, we are well-positioned to capture it. Data creation isn't slowing. It's accelerating. As the value of data grows, so does the infrastructure storage requirements to store, manage, and protect it. That's a durable long-term tailwind for our business, and we intend to fully capitalize on it. Our technology roadmap is strong, our customer relationships are deep, and we have the operational discipline to translate this opportunity into sustained earnings and free cash flow growth and long-term shareholder value. With that, let me hand it over to Kris to walk you through the financials and our outlook for Q1.

Thank you, Irving, and good afternoon, everyone. Fiscal 2026 was an outstanding year for WD, driven by broadening demand, deepening customer engagements, and disciplined execution. We grew revenue 36% to $12.9 billion, while expanding gross margins 970 basis points to 49.1%, and increasing operating margins by 1,290 basis points to 37.3%. We more than doubled earnings per share to $10.22, and we generated $3.5 billion of free cash flow, delivering a robust 27% free cash flow margin. We returned $3.1 billion to shareholders, reflecting our confidence in the durability of the business and our commitment to long-term value creation. Let me now turn to our fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. Revenue came in at $3.75 billion, up 44% year-over-year on the back of strong exabyte growth and favorable pricing dynamics. Earnings per share grew 109% year-over-year to $3.56.

Revenue, gross margin, and EPS all came in at or above the high end of the guidance range. We delivered 231 exabytes to our customers, up 22% year-over-year. Nearline continued to drive our exabyte growth, complemented by solid non-nearline exabyte growth in the quarter. We began shipping the next generation ePMR drives with capacities up to 40 terabyte in our fiscal fourth quarter and expect a strong ramp over the next few quarters. Cloud represented 89% of total revenue at $3.3 billion, up 43% year-over-year, as demand for our high-capacity nearline products was strong with a favorable pricing environment. Client represented 6% of total revenue at $225 million, up 61% year-over-year. Consumer represented 5% of revenue at $187 million, up 38% year-over-year. Both segments benefited from improved pricing.

Gross margin expanded 1,310 basis points year-over-year to 54.4%, resulting in strong year-over-year incremental gross margin. This was driven by a mix shift towards higher capacity drives, favorable pricing across our portfolio, and disciplined execution in our manufacturing operations. During the quarter, the blended average year-over-year price increase per terabyte improved from high single digits last quarter to high teens this quarter, reflecting the impact of our predictable and sustainable pricing strategy as we deliver greater value to our customers. Operating expenses were $382 million or approximately 10% of revenue, a 170 basis point sequential improvement, demonstrating further operating leverage in the model. Strong top-line growth, expanding gross margins, and leverage in the model drove operating income to $1.66 billion, up 126% year-over-year, translating into a durable operating margin of 44.2%, up 1,610 basis points year-over-year.

Interest and other expenses were $10 million, our effective tax rate was 16%. Taking into account the diluted share count of 388 million shares, earnings per share was $3.56, an increase of 109% year-over-year. Operating cash flow was $1.4 billion, and CapEx was $108 million. This resulted in free cash flow generation of $1.3 billion for the quarter and a strong free cash flow margin of 34%. During the quarter, we completed the monetization of the remaining 1.7 million shares of SanDisk, exchanging them for 4.8 million WD shares. Additionally, we repurchased 2.3 million shares of our common stock for a total of $1 billion. Our full-year and fourth quarter repurchase numbers that we are describing on this call include $328 million to settle the conversion premium for some of our converts in cash rather than in stock, avoiding the issuance of roughly 773,000 new shares.

We also made $54 million of dividend payments, we ended the quarter with $1.1 billion of debt and $1.6 billion of cash, resulting in a net positive cash position of $500 million. Lastly, the board has declared a cash dividend of $0.15 per share of our common stock, which will be paid on September 17, 2026, to our shareholders of record as of September 8, 2026. I will now turn to the outlook for the first quarter of fiscal 2027. We continue to operate in a strong demand environment, with improving longer-term visibility and favorable pricing dynamics across our cloud, consumer, and client end markets. We expect revenue to be $4.1 billion, ±$100 million. At midpoint, this reflects a growth of 45% year-over-year. Gross margin is expected to be in the range of 55%-56%.

We anticipate operating expenses in the range of $390 million-$400 million. Interest and other expenses are expected to be $15 million. The tax rate is expected to be 17%. As a result, we expect diluted earnings per share to be $4, ±$0.15, based on a non-GAAP diluted share count of 388 million shares. As we look ahead, we have high conviction in the drivers of demand. AI, cloud, and the proliferation of data-intensive workloads continue to accelerate. On the supply side, our industry-leading technology and product roadmaps, combined with strong operational execution, enable us to deliver substantially more exabytes to our customers. This does not require spending CapEx to add unit capacity, but we are making the necessary investments in our heads and media operations, as well as in automation to increase our productivity.

In summary, durable demand, disciplined supply, and expanding margins position us to deliver sustained earnings growth, strong free cash flow, and long-term shareholder value. With that, let's now begin the Q&A. Ambrish?

Thank you, Kris. Operator, you can now open the line to questions, please. To ensure that we hear from as many analysts as possible, please ask one question at a time. After we respond, we will give you an opportunity to ask one follow-up question. Operator?

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from CJ Muse from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. It's hard not to compare your results with your main competitor, where they're seeing better sequential top-line growth and targeting gross margins nearly 200 basis points higher than your September guide. Curious, what would you make of this? Is that due to their earlier ramp of HAMR? Is it a difference in timing of contracts? Perhaps you're selling fewer bits into the open market. Would love to hear your thoughts there and how you think about gross margin acceleration from here. Do we need to wait for HAMR in calendar 2027, or are there other drivers that can allow you to push higher? Thank you.

Thanks for the question, CJ. There are always quarter-to-quarter variations in terms of gross margin because there's a whole range of factors that go into driving it. Obviously, timing of pricing in relation to long-term agreement contracts is one, there will always be timing differences on when existing LTAs expire and new LTAs kick in with different pricing regimes. That's one factor. Second will be the introduction of next-generation platforms. We're very excited that we started shipping in Q4 already our up to 40-terabyte ePMR drives. Right now, we are very much on track to hit 50% of nearline bits on that platform by third quarter of fiscal year 2027. That, again, will drive our ability to ship more higher capacity drives into the marketplace, and provide some additional upside opportunity from pricing.

As well, obviously, we continue to work on operational efficiencies like we normally do. In short, there will always be quarter-to-quarter variations, but we feel very confident with the things that I mentioned in terms of the pricing structures that we have put in place with LTAs, the introduction of our higher cap drives coming out in the second half of the year, and our ongoing operational efficiencies that will lead to stronger exabyte growth, continuous top-line growth, and obviously, ongoing margin expansion.

Do you have a quick follow-up, CJ, which wouldn't be a multi-part question, please? Thank you.

Of course. Marvell hosted this session, at Flash Memory Summit, talking about the economically indispensable nature of HDDs in the AI data center. Curious with that as a backdrop, how has your visibility improved, and how do you think it could improve further as you start signing contracts that renew? Thanks so much.

Thanks for the question, CJ. I think we have strong visibility and increasingly strong visibility. It is being customer-driven to a large degree as well. The last time we reported on LTAs, we talked about having one LTA of a large customer all the way up to calendar year 2029. We are very much in the throes of discussions with customers to establish LTAs for calendar year 2029, 2030, and 2031 as well. Visibility remains very strong. Customer-driven demand for LTAs extending all the way out to 2031 remains very strong. We continue to work on them. I think we have very good line of sight in terms of the exabyte demand. What we are working through with them is more in terms of the pricing commercial construct of what those LTAs would look like going forward.

Our next question comes from Amit Daryanani from Evercore. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. I guess maybe the first one is, exabyte shipments were up about 21%, I think, year-over-year to 231. That is below the 30% exabyte growth you folks have had the last several quarters. Can you just talk about, is this a temporary pause related to timing or supply, or does this represent a more normalized growth rate? How should we think about exabyte growth through fiscal 2027?

Amit, I think what we have guided to is at exabyte, we see demand growing at above 25%, like 25%+ going forward. We clearly have a roadmap that is designed to support that. There will, again, as I mentioned, similar to margins, be quarter-to-quarter fluctuations in terms of exabyte growth rates, depending on the mix of products that we ship. As we move into the second half of the year, as we really ramp up the 40 terabyte shipments, as I mentioned, that will be over 50% of the nearline exabytes we ship, we expect exabyte growth rate to accelerate. Obviously, we have HAMR coming on in the second half of the year and into calendar 2027 as well at the 44 terabyte level.

Just to add, I think in Q4, exabyte shipments were up 22% year-over-year. When you look at it on a full fiscal year 2026, exabytes were up 25% year-over-year.

I do. Thanks a lot, Ambrish. Just on the pricing side, price per terabyte went up pretty dramatically, high teens year-over-year. Kris, I think you talked about this. Can you just talk about how do you think pricing is going to keep evolving from here? Maybe specifically the new LTA that you folks are signing, are they enabling this kind of high teens pricing, or is there more upside as we go forward? Thank you very much.

Amit, I think we were beneficiaries of across-the-board pricing improvements, both in terms of our nearline products and obviously in the client and consumer space as well. In terms of the nearline, especially with our large customers, we've been very consistent in talking about predictable pricing, that's the strategy we continue to adopt. This will give them visibility to ensure that they can make long-term architectural decisions with the right economics to underpin that. Even then, as we increase higher capacity drives, we provide better TCO value to them. That gives us an opportunity to increase pricing, you'll see that on a very predictable basis going forward. In terms of the non-nearline space, particularly in our client and consumer space, we saw a higher opportunity to increase pricing, predominantly driven by the pricing structures on alternative products that are flash-based as well.

That resulted in a slightly higher pricing environment. Kris, anything you want to add to that?

The next question comes from Aaron Rakers from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks for taking the question. I guess kind of building on the prior two questions, it seems to me like you've got a product transition dynamic going on with the 40 terabyte ePMR drive. If I look at your cost structure, it looks like you saw a cost per terabyte that was more maybe flattish down a little bit sequential. I'm curious, as we move through this product transition, how should we think about cost per terabyte or cost of goods sold per terabyte progressing through 2027?

Yeah. Aaron, the cost per terabyte in Q4 of fiscal 2026, the quarter that we reported was down approximately 8% year-over-year. We've indicated before that cost per terabyte, in the long term, will come down on or about 10% year-over-year. You know the main driver, as Irving already explained, is the move to higher capacity drives, better areal density, which gives us a substantial reduction on a cost per terabyte. As we execute in the near, mid, and long term, execute on our technology roadmap, execute on our product roadmap, introduce the next innovation, ePMR, and introduce our HAMR products into the market, we will, over time, continue to see cost per terabyte coming down.

I do. Maybe, Kris, back to you. You've done a lot on the balance sheet, right? You've got a $1.1 billion left on kind of the debt. You've got $1.6 billion in the cash. I'm just curious, how are you thinking about the capital structure from here? Is it pretty much 100% free cash flow return? Do you want to put more debt on the balance sheet? I'm just curious if any updated thoughts on that. Thank you.

Yeah. No change there to our strategy and our commitment to return the free cash flow back to the shareholders consistently with what we have been doing over the last four or five quarters through a combination of our dividend payments as well as our share repurchases. We're fully committed to those two programs.

Our next question comes from Wamsi Mohan from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Yes, thank you so much. I was wondering, Irving, if you would maybe drill down a little bit on the mix comment that you made in the answer to one of the prior questions on the 22% exabyte growth, because we previously expected that there was room to deliver more exabytes in the quarter, and the deceleration seems pretty strong. I was hoping maybe you can double-click a little bit on your mix comment. At the same time, you're expecting, obviously, an acceleration here in your comments, both on sort of a macro level as well as from your product cadence perspective. Anything you could give us in terms of what is changing in that mix very specifically, which caused maybe the slower growth in the quarter. I mean, 22% is pretty strong, but definitely a deceleration. Then further acceleration.

Is there a near-term cap on that before you maybe start to ramp HAMR?

Yeah. Thanks for the question, Wamsi. A lot of it, as you know well, we have very large customers. Different customers take different types of technology. If there's a particular customer in a particular quarter that takes a bit more CMR products, obviously that will mean we ship a fewer bits into the marketplace for the number of units that we have, right? In a different quarter where we have customers that are more UltraSMR heavy, for the same number of units, we're able to deliver much more exabytes into the marketplace. There'll always be variations quarter to quarter, and they don't buy on a very linear basis. It's a bit lumpy. You will see sort of quarter-to-quarter variations within that.

From a medium to long-term trajectory, we feel very confident about the ongoing exabyte growth, the ability to hit that 25-plus% growth trajectory that we shared, both in terms of the 40 terabyte ePMR that we're ramping up very aggressively. Obviously we have the 44 terabyte HAMR coming out in the first half of calendar year 2027, which we'll ramp. Obviously we've indicated in our roadmap we will have 50 terabyte products coming out towards the second half of calendar year 2027.

Okay. That's helpful, Irving. Thank you. If I could just follow up. When you look at your quarter-over-quarter gross margins from your guidance, not to beat a dead horse here, year-over-year, you still are suggesting pretty strong incrementals. I get that. Is there anything specific within, again, mix and sort of pricing dynamic that is changing on a sequential basis? Or is the pricing dynamic something that should persist and it's more about just sort of the mix that's creating maybe not further upside to the gross margins?

Yeah, Wamsi. Definitely, again, quarter to quarter, there's going to be variations. That's why I'm not really fixated on my sequential incremental gross margins. I look more on my incremental gross margins on a year-over-year basis. Just to put some numbers around that, in fiscal 2025, on a full year basis, our incremental gross margin was 60%. In fiscal 2026, the fiscal year that we just ended, incremental gross margins were 75% year-over-year. Ending in Q4 with incremental gross margin year-over-year 84%-85%. Implied in the guide for Q1 is a year-over-year incremental gross margin of 80%-81%. I think we're executing really well on driving incremental gross margins, further improving the gross margins. I have high conviction that we will continue to improve gross margins for many quarters going forward based on everything what we've explained. There is very strong demand.

We're moving to higher capacity drives that provides more value to our customers, and that enables us to increase our price per terabyte while at the same time driving down the cost per terabyte. I think that's a great recipe for further gross margins improvements.

Our next question comes from Krish Sankar from TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi. Thanks for taking my question. My first one, Irving, clearly, your pricing is improving pretty well. You kind of mentioned customers asking for LTAs into 2029, 2030, 2031. I'm just wondering, with 90% of your bits going into cloud and most of them in LTAs and those LTAs extending longer, the velocity of price increases that we are seeing going from high single digits to high teens last quarter and probably 20% in September quarter, would that slow down because most are under LTA? Or do you think there's still flexibility where the velocity of price increases could still increase?

Yeah, thanks for the question. As I pointed out, I think if you talk about the cloud business, as you pointed out, quite a significant amount of it is under LTA. Obviously, not every LTA starts and ends at the same time. We will see price adjustments from LTAs even as we go through the fiscal year, depending on when the contracts kick in with the new pricing. That's obviously dictated by some of the new platforms we introduce into the market. Where we've seen a bit more ability to drive more rapid price increases has been in the non-nearline space.

If we fast-forward that to what we're looking at in terms of what we're discussing with customers on 2029, 2030, 2031, we're working through the specific commercial constructs of the LTAs. We have a good line of sight and visibility to the volume requirements of our customers that sort of further strengthen our conviction on that 25%+ exabyte growth. What we're working through is the pricing regime of how we would effect that for those years going forward. In short, I think there's still a lot of opportunity for us to deliver more value to our customers, deliver better TCO, and be able to benefit that through pricing as we've always stated we would do.

Yeah. Thanks a lot, Ambrish. A quick follow-up for Kris. You kind of mentioned how the cost per terabyte downs are probably high single digits right now, and it can get to down 10% cost downs. Is that in a post-HAMR qualification world, or do you think that's something you can get to by the next few quarters?

I have said in the past and repeat it today, that the mid to long-term cost per terabyte decline is on or about 10% year-over-year. If you look at it the last couple of quarters, we've been executing to that, and I have high conviction again over the longer term that we will be able to execute to that. There are always going to be some variations quarter-to-quarter, but mid to longer term, and it's all driven by our technology roadmap and our product transitions to higher areal density and higher capacity drives that will bring down the cost per terabyte.

Our next question comes from Asiya Merchant from Citi. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. This is Mike Cadiz for Asiya Merchant at Citi. My first question is that given your LTA conversations and of course the visibility that they provide, can you perhaps talk about the types of workloads your customers are planning to accommodate, be it agentic or physical, et cetera? How, if at all, the workloads differ through time from LTAs encompassing one year term 2027 to LTAs and conversations covering 2028, 2029, and even 2030? Just wanted to see the progressions of workloads from your perspective.

Sure. I think the amount of the workloads remain the same, and there are a couple of growth drivers that we see, and we are definitely getting visibility from customers. One, and first of all, something that's underappreciated, core cloud services continue to grow as well, especially video-driven applications. A good example is the collaboration tools that many of us use each and every day. A lot of these video meetings that we're on are getting stored at an increasing rate that's driving a lot more storage demands and on core cloud services. Obviously in AI, the primary drivers over the last 24, 36 months have been model training and development. What we're seeing now and going forward is growth driven by inference, agentic AI. Actually, we're starting to see the early innings of growth being driven by physical AI as well.

We are engaging with many large enterprise customers who are in the physical AI space, and we have good visibility in terms of the growth trajectories in those areas as well. Definitely growth coming from those vectors that I just shared. On top of that, obviously, with the introduction of our innovations like the High-Bandwidth Drives that we have now sampling with five customers, that opens up the ability to also be able to deliver hard drive capabilities with the superior economics that it has in higher bandwidth workloads as well. We see that also as a future driver of growth that we are very excited about, that customers are engaging very closely with us on.

Operator, we can go to the next caller, please.

The next question comes from Erik Woodring from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thank you very much for taking my questions. Irving, last quarter you mentioned starting to see some interest from sovereign and neo cloud data centers for nearline drives in your systems. Can you maybe just tease that thought out a bit more now that we're three months beyond that comment? Just what are they buying? How price sensitive are they? How big are they? How big could they get, et cetera. Then a quick follow-up. Thanks.

Sure, Erik. It's a great question. I think we looked at them as an opportunity, and that opportunity is materializing today. Again, I would highlight three areas. We definitely see increasing demand from neo clouds, actually, even frontier AI labs are coming to us for supply. As I just touched on to the earlier question, physical AI companies. We've seen very strong demand from an autonomous vehicle company for more storage as they ramp up their autonomous vehicle capabilities. We're seeing more demand for sovereigns from neo clouds, from AI frontier labs as well as they particularly see the economic benefits from hard drives and the increasing storage demands that their business models are creating as well. In terms of pricing, I would say they are in the very tight supply environment that we're in, that provides us an opportunity for increased pricing leverage as well.

Just a quick one. Just a clarification, Irving, on your kind of pricing commentary. Am I correct in that you have sequential pricing escalators in some of your contracted pricing? Given that demand has strengthened and you are adding more value to your customers now with these higher capacity drives, is it the right way to think that these pricing escalators are accelerating, or is that maybe over-extrapolating too much? Thanks so much, guys.

You're probably over-extrapolating a bit too much, Erik. I would say that the LTAs obviously have a base price associated to a base volume. Then as we are able to deliver upside to our customers, that's subject to a different pricing construct. That's generally what we've consistently said, as a general construct of how the LTAs are commercially organized.

The next question comes from Ben Reitzes from Melius. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask you, given the product ramp and improving demand environment, should we expect the first quarter fiscal to represent the low point for both sequential revenue growth and incremental margins with acceleration as we move throughout the year, with regard to FY 2027?

Yeah, Ben, as you know, we only guide one quarter at a time. Again, I think this quarter we are guiding to some strong sequential growth as well as year-over-year growth and some good incremental, strong incremental gross margins on a year-over-year basis. Again, we have based on the strong demand environment that we see, based on our great execution on technology and product roadmap, based on the fact that we are at the beginning of a ramp of the introduction of our new generation of ePMR, up to 40 terabytes, followed then by our HAMR introduction. We have high conviction that we can continue to ship a lot more exabytes at better pricing and driving down the cost over time, which will lead to continuous strong revenue growth, as well as further gross margins improvements. I'll leave it at that.

Yeah. I just was wondering if you could tease out physical AI a little more. I think that what might be useful for investors is there's a ton of training video, but also synthetic video. You're mentioning it now more prominently than you did, I believe, in the prior quarters. I was just wondering, did something change? How do you see that your tier, being impacted by what's probably going to be a surge in both synthetic and video data used to train these things? Thanks.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Ben. Yes, we have highlighted it a bit more this quarter, specifically because we're getting a lot better visibility from this space as well. I highlighted an example with autonomous vehicle player where I would say that the increase in exabyte demand from them for this or sorry, calendar year 2027, has increased multiple-fold, right? We're definitely seeing that. If you extrapolate that by the number of players in this space, you extend that to humanoids, you extend that to industrial automation systems as well. As I highlighted in the prepared remarks, in many of these cases, they are generating new data from the tools and the vehicles that they are collecting data from, but it's still insufficient to train their models as well.

They're also using the existing data, feeding it into AI tools to generate synthetic data to further train the models and drive reinforcement learning. That's requiring a lot more storage data, as well. The cycle that we saw in how model training development inference was being created will extend into what is happening into physical AI, but it's becoming very real now, and we see that being a driver of growth 2027 and beyond as well.

Our next question comes from Karl Ackerman from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Okay. Thank you. I have two questions, if I may. First, how should we think about the gross margin delta today between nearline versus non-nearline? I ask because given the greater availability to raise prices in the non-nearline HDD market, I would imagine that gap closes. Then what share of these LTAs reprice for nearline over the next 12 months?

The gross margin between nearline, non-nearline, which includes consumer and client and all of that, it's all in the same ballpark right now in the five zip code. There's not a lot of differentiation there anymore.

Got it. Okay. Thank you. Irving, obviously hyperscale demand is robust. How large is on-prem enterprise now? Are you able to sign LTAs with them too? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Karl. I would say again that the vast majority of the nearline bits that we're shipping are going to hyperscale customers. Increasingly, there's actually increased demand from enterprise OEM players in the storage space, especially as they are pivoting to more hybrid-based storage solutions, where most recently they were looking at all potentially 100% flash array systems. There's a shift back towards hybrid systems that's driving more demand from us. We are also factoring their forward-looking requirements into the projections that we're working on in terms of supply, that's giving us better visibility as well. Obviously, our engineering teams are also working with them to be able to adopt our UltraSMR products and next generation ePMR or HAMR products that will give them higher capacity drives, therefore more exabytes faster as well.

Thank you. Operator, we'll go to the last caller, please.

Next question is from Ananda Baruah from Loop Capital. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks, guys. Thanks, Ambrish, for squeezing me in here. Irving, Kris, just was wondering what's a useful way to think about sort of the China hyperscale and the China AI lab opportunity going forward, with all the activity that's been going on there?

Yeah, thanks for the question, Ananda. I think the Asian market represents, obviously, a very exciting opportunity for us. We've clearly been hearing and seeing a lot about the proliferation of AI frontier lab models there that are open source. We think that's actually going to be good for the overall industry because that's actually going to drive greater access to different models that will help to proliferate AI a lot more with superior economics. Depending on the use case, you can use different economic models to be able to drive growth and value in the different applications.

At the heart of it, whether it's the traditional frontier models that you've seen in the U.S. that are premium based or some of the new open source, more economical models, the underlying requirement is still that they're going to be able to require a lot of data to support the training of these models. These models are going to generate a lot more data that requires storage for us. We view it as very positive because even as compute maybe drives greater efficiency in terms of compute and memory resources, the requirement for storage is just going to compound and grow. We view it very positively for demand going forward.

Yeah, quick one. Thanks. Just dovetailing from there, the interplay between mixing up the meaningfully higher areal density points, counterbalanced against we're at the front end of inference which is the real kind of killer use case for hard drives. How do you see those two things sort of impacting the supply-demand gap in the coming years?

Well, we think the growth in inferencing will be positive in terms of the demand for higher capacity drive. Because inferencing is actually going to generate even more data that's going to be required to be stored, both to support reinforcement learning and the fact that storing that context of data that's generated is going to be more economical than rerunning it through compute and memory resources. We think actually as inferencing and agentic growth is going to drive even more demand for storage, and the best way to deliver that storage, with superior TCO and at the fastest rate, is to deliver high capacity drives, which is definitely something we're working towards delivering to our customers.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Thank you. At WD, as we look ahead to our new fiscal year and beyond, we do so with a very clear sense of purpose. Our customers are counting on us to deliver storage infrastructure at scale and speed that matches the pace and adoption of AI, and we are very much ready to that challenge. We're confident that our technology leads, our execution is disciplined, and the entire WD team remains focused on delivering. I want to really take this opportunity to thank the entire WD team for an outstanding year, to our investors and analysts for joining us today. Thank you for your time and your continued confidence in Western Digital.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Western Digital (WDC) Q4 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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