Key takeaways
- At Western Digital, we are delivering the purpose-built data storage solutions that make the entire AI revolution possible.
- Our differentiator is a system of three principles, beginning with our customer-centric innovation, optimization, and storage offerings built for the AI era.
- Principle two underpins the quality and reliability of our products based on rigorous resilience engineered into every drive.
- Our final principle is the culture of excellence that pervades our organization, from operations to innovation to customer interactions.
The data economy shift
In the AI era, storage isn’t a commodity—it’s a catalyst for innovation. According to IDC, “the amount of data generated worldwide each year will more than triple between 2024 and 2029.”1 That is not just growth, it is complexity. As AI workloads accelerate across cloud, core, and edge, the performance, scale, and reliability of data infrastructure are becoming non-negotiable.
At Western Digital, we see storage not as the unsung hero of the data center but as the strategic foundation of the AI era. Without scalable, intelligent storage, even the most powerful models stall. That’s why our focus isn’t simply on building bigger drives—it’s on engineering a portfolio that enables innovation today and scales for tomorrow.
Our mission is to architect the foundation of the AI data economy: solutions that are intelligent, efficient, performant, and reliable enough to turn data into business results. We do this with deep science, engineering excellence, and customer collaboration that ensure every advance delivers measurable value.
Whether customers are training large-scale models, optimizing hybrid clouds, or pushing analytics to the edge, Western Digital is ready to partner and deliver. Because storage is not a commodity. It’s the foundation of the data economy, for both enterprise and AI.
The principles that guide us
Our principles are the operating system for engineering trust, resilience, and readiness in the AI era:
1. Customer Needs, Delivered First
Customer-Centric Innovation: Innovation starts with what our customers fear the most: challenges that limit progress—and it ends with what they value the most: scalable growth. We build storage solutions around customer business outcomes, not just specs and standards. We develop for our customers to solve real-world challenges and ensure our innovation is anchored in their needs, especially in times of rapid technological change—whether that’s lowering TCO at hyperscale or boosting throughput for AI pipelines. When we engineer a solution, our outcomes are quick and precise to deliver high-quality results. If it doesn’t move a customer’s business forward, it’s not a solution.
AI-Ready Infrastructure: Our solutions are built for the AI era, both training and inference, to meet customers’ needs for quality, at scale, and across hybrid environments. For example, we helped one of the world’s largest beverage manufacturers, who unlocked heavily delayed AI business efficiency projects by simply adding 860TB of Western Digital Ultrastar™ capacity—no new racks, no re-architecture, just the right-scale storage foundation for innovation.2
One Storage Hierarchy: DRAM, flash, HDDs, and archives aren’t rivals—they’re teammates in every customer’s data stack. Each technology plays a role in the storage hierarchy that best fits their complementary strengths. We meet our customers where they are and where they are going.
Efficiency at Scale: At scale every small problem is a business risk. Customers make decisions on what to deploy based on failure rates, dollars per TB, TB per kW, and performance per TB. We work with customers to find the best fit for their needs—like a global media streaming company who swapped SSDs for Ultrastar HDDs to boost peak-hour performance and cut TCO, simply by matching storage architecture to workload reality.3
System-Wide Optimization: The drive is at the heart of data storage, but it is part of a system of tradeoffs to balance cost, power, and performance. We do our part to deliver the best system cost and performance by working with our customers to find balances.
When we stick to our principles, we simplify adoption, reduce risk, and deliver choice, flexibility, and reliability on our customers’ terms. We become their trusted long-term partner because we share success while learning from challenges together.
2. Quality and Reliability You Can Trust
Our high quality maximizes customer profitability. Every deployment is a promise: Always On. Always There. Always Trusted. We deliver reliability built for scale, with systems engineered for seamless availability customers can trust. To our customers, a failed drive isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a cascade, rippling into petabytes of rebalancing, hours of customer disruption, and millions in lost revenue and productivity costs. At hyperscale, even a fraction of a percent matters.
Customers choose Western Digital for peace of mind. Why? Because our drives are tested to customer standards and built to perform at scale and thrive under pressure. From firmware to materials science and the physics of recording, we engineer resilience into every layer.
We minimize failures and failure impacts. We are proud of the quality we engineer into our products. Case in point: Dropbox achieves >99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability at exabyte scale with our Ultrastar SMR drives.4 Proof that minimizing failures isn’t just theory—it’s running in our production today.
I used to sit where many of our customers do today—owning storage and infrastructure at hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft. That is why partnership is not a slogan for me, it is a reality to live by. It is how we work, because I know what real operational trust looks like at exabyte scale. Ultimately, we don’t just integrate with hyperscalers—we co-innovate with them.
At the end of the day, we seek to earn customers’ trust through consistent, long-term, win-win value delivery. And that is what we promise to hold ourselves to every day.
We also know that when a new drive capacity is available, customers reduce their cost per TB. Any time wasted between the drive’s general availability and ramp into the customer production is an opportunity to increase value through lower end-user pricing and greater profitability. We work with our customers to minimize the time between drive availability and ramping adoption into their infrastructure. Our Systems Integration Test (SIT) Lab provides dedicated test capabilities that mirror our hyperscale customers’ production environments, enabling collaborative integrated product development with our customers as we develop the drive. We test each unit’s limits and measure its reliability under extreme conditions designed to mimic the most aggressive workloads in dedicated and isolated labs that respect each customer’s intellectual property.
3. A Culture of Innovation and Excellence
At Western Digital excellence and innovation are habits. They are what we do when no one is watching.
Innovation is a mindset that powers every breakthrough and every byte. We have reinvented the drive multiple times, and we are doing it again with technologies like HelioSeal®, UltraSMR, OptiNAND™, and of course HAMR. Our inventions scale without sacrificing reliability or economics. Innovation isn’t a product moment—it’s a Western Digital mindset.
And it runs deep. We have over 4,500 active patents. Decades of mastery in magnetics, system integration, and nano-fabrication. A tenured team with over 300+ PHDs who know how to build the future because they’ve already built the past—6 zettabytes of it across three different incarnations as IBM, HGST, and Western Digital.
We often talk about innovation in terms of the product—but our customers care just as much about how we build it. That’s why our manufacturing isn’t just state-of-the-art, it’s forward-thinking: designed for efficiency, sustainability, and full lifecycle responsibility from the very first design decision. It’s why we’ve published corporate goals of net-zero emissions by 2032 and 100% carbon-free energy by 2030.
In the product organization, we treat our manufacturing colleagues like customers too, because their success becomes our customers’ success. When we build smarter, it shows up as reduced carbon footprint, lower water use, higher recycled content, and ultimately, products that are as responsible as they are reliable.
We are ready for the AI era
What I found when I joined Western Digital was not hype. It was depth. A depth of science, engineering, and operational excellence that few companies in the world can match. It is why we are not reacting to the AI era.
We are ready for it. Innovation and excellence are at the heart of every drive and Driver.
That is not noise—it’s signal. And it’s how we earn trust now, and for the next 55 years.
- Source: IDC’s Global DataSphere, 2025
- Source: Western Digital Delivers High-Density Data Storage to Beverage Manufacturer Thirsting for More Capacity
- Source: Beyond the SSD Hype: How a Media Streaming Superpower Leveraged HDDs to Increase Performance
- Source: Dropbox Magic Pocket Achieves Exabyte Scale with Western Digital High-Density Hard Disk Drives
