Western Digital (WD) announced on the 13th that it held an investor conference and announced the company's future vision and business strategy ahead of the planned separation of its flash business.

Irving Tan, incoming CEO of WD, emphasized that Western Digital is strengthening its industry leadership by providing world-class sustainable storage solutions.

CEO-designate Tan revealed Western Digital's outlook on the impact of the spread of artificial intelligence (AI) on the HDD industry and data storage value.

As enterprises generate and store more data, the use cases for text-to-image generative AI (GenAI) workloads, text-to-video applications, and building large-scale data lakes for AI model training are increasing, which is expected to drive HDD exabyte shipments to grow at a CAGR of 23% from 2024 to 2028.

Western Digital projects that global data production will more than triple from 2023 to 2028, and is providing storage solutions with the scalability, total cost of ownership (TCO), and sustainability to accommodate this.

CEO-designate Tan said Western Digital is accelerating the development of its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology to meet the rapidly growing demand for data, and is currently working with two major hyperscaler customers. They said that testing is in progress.

Building on its scalable storage portfolio, Western Digital is enabling customers to meet today’s growing data demands while establishing long-term infrastructure plans, as performance improvements from UltraSMR technology extend to HAMR.

“The future holds tremendous opportunity, and Western Digital is ready to be a leader in data storage that meets our customers’ storage needs, both now and in the future,” said Irving Tan, CEO-designate. “Western Digital is not just advancing the future of HDDs; we’re also helping enterprise and cloud customers around the world maximize the value of their data.”