Western Digital WDC Q2 2026 Earnings Transcript

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Thursday, January 29, 2026 astatine 4:30 p.m. ET

• Chief Executive Officer — Tiang Yew Tan

• Chief Financial Officer — Kris Sennesael

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Tiang Yew Tan: Thanks, Ambrish, and bully afternoon, everyone, and convey you for joining america today. The maturation and interaction of AI continues to accelerate crossed galore industries. As generative AI models go the norm and agentic AI scales to thrust concern productivity, it is wide that AI is becoming a existent strategical enabler of concern transformation. AI inference has besides begun to instrumentality clasp successful galore ways becoming the existent AI workload with deployment to chat bots and virtual assistants and lawsuit narration absorption tools. Further innovations successful carnal AI are besides accelerating quickly, generating progressively larger multimodal models propelled by advancements successful autonomous vehicles and robotics.

In each cases, it is information that is needed to substance the full AI process from grooming to inference to alteration stronger models and sharper inference results. And arsenic much information is generated and the worth of information increases, the request to store it is expanding astatine a accelerated rate. As AI capabilities expand, unreality continues to turn arsenic well, and some are driving the surge successful request for higher-density retention solutions. In this caller epoch wherever AI and unreality dominate, Western Digital has taken a customer-focused attack to managing the beardown request by moving intimately with our hyperscale customers, ensuring that we present reliable, high-capacity drives astatine standard to springiness them the champion show and full outgo of ownership.

We are doing this by continuing to absorption connected expanding our drives areal density and accelerating our HAMR and ePMR roadworthy maps arsenic good arsenic upshifting our customers to accelerate adoption of higher capableness drives and UltraSMR technology. This past quarter, we shipped implicit 3.5 cardinal units of our latest procreation ePMR products, offering up to 26 terabyte CMR and 32 terabyte by UltraSMR capacities, representing beardown assurance and adoption by our customers. We person besides started qualification of our HAMR and next-generation ePMR products, each with a antithetic hyperscale customer. These drives volition connection our customers the higher capableness and amended full outgo of ownership that they are looking for. In addition, we proceed to accelerate our HAMR innovation.

To enactment this, we precocious acquired intelligence spot assets and endowment that volition assistance america successful the improvement of our interior laser capabilities. Also this past quarter, successful concern with bundle ecosystem partners, we announced our UltraSMR-enabled JBOD platforms, expanding UltraSMR adoption to a broader lawsuit set. These platforms present importantly higher retention density compared to accepted drives. giving customers hyperscale-like show and marque wide standard information investigation much sustainable and efficient. We are genuinely seeing our attack resonate with our customers, and this is reflected successful longer-term agreements and amended visibility into their requirements. We person steadfast acquisition orders with our apical 7 customers done calendar twelvemonth 2026.