Over the last couple of months, the AI industry’s obsession with building out costly data centers has sent the price of RAM skyrocketing, turning a simple computer upgrade into a costly investment.
And while there are some early glimmers of hope, with RAM prices now falling across the pond, the next AI price hike could affect a different component instead: hard drives.
During a recent company earnings call, Irving Tan, the CEO of hard drive manufacturer Western Digital, admitted that “we’re pretty much sold out for calendar 2026.”
As PCWorld explains, Tan was referring to the company’s production capacity as part of an effort to allocate its available inventory to its customers.
While Western Digital hard drives will remain on the shelves for now, prices could soon follow the footsteps of RAM and graphical processing units as the hype surrounding generative AI continues to dominate markets — and terrify investors.
“As AI capabilities expand, cloud continues to grow as well, and both are driving the search and demand for higher density storage solutions,” Tan told investors. “In this new era where AI and cloud dominate, Western Digital has taken a customer-focused approach to managing this strong demand by working closely with our hyperscale customers, ensuring that we deliver reliable, high-capacity drives at scale to give them the best performance and total cost of ownership.”
The sales figures tell a clear story: just under 90 percent of the company’s revenue comes from cloud storage. The hyperscalers Tan was referring to are the cloud computing and data management services that need access to enormous data centers for both data processing and storage.
The enormous demand from AI industry players has already hit the hard drive market hard. In November, Tom’s Hardware reported that hard drives were on backorder for two years following major investments in AI data centers.
Tan’s comments will likely do little to reassure consumers. Between September and January, average hard drive prices had already surged by a whopping 46 percent.
More on RAM prices: AI Data Centers Are Making RAM Crushingly Expensive, Which Is Going to Skyrocket the Cost of Laptops, Tablets, and Gaming PCs
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