Western Digital (WDC) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript

Motley Fool Transcribing, The Motley Fool

Tue, April 14, 2026 astatine 10:17 AM CDT 37 min read

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Thursday, October 30, 2025 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. Good afternoon, everyone, and convey you for joining america today. Across industries, adoption of AI is expanding, fueling innovation, reshaping concern models and ushering successful a caller question of integer translation marked by higher productivity and richer idiosyncratic experiences. As agentic AI begins to standard astatine respective industries and multimodal LLM go the norm, we are seeing a dependable acceleration of AI usage cases and applications, driving robust ongoing request for the information infrastructure that enables this growth. AI is not lone a user of data, but a prolific creator of information arsenic well, some synthetic and existent world. It is reshaping however information is being generated, scaled, stored and monetized.

Data is the substance that powers AI and it is HDDs that supply the astir reliable, scalable and cost-effective information retention solution, playing a captious relation successful storing the ever-increasing zettabytes of information created by the AI-driven economy. To mention an illustration of however AI is transforming assorted industries, 1 of the world's starring aesculapian institutions is utilizing an AI workflow that analyzes implicit 7 cardinal images derived from 14 cardinal deidentified diligent records. This process enables predictive analysis, improves the velocity and accuracy of diagnostics to present enhanced diligent outcomes. Such applications are generating monolithic volumes of caller information that is being stored.

At Western Digital, we are besides leveraging AI internally to heighten productivity and accelerate innovation crossed our organization. For example, successful engineering, AI is helping to modernize our firmware, enabling america to present caller features rapidly to our customers and successful a much cost-effective manner. In our factories, we are seeing productivity gains of up to 10% successful prime AI usage cases. AI tools are improving yield, detecting defect patterns done intelligent diagnostics and optimizing our trial processes. In parallel, they are besides being utilized to up-level our technician capabilities, enabling them to execute higher skilled tasks, accelerating contented diagnostics and troubleshooting. Across firm functions, AI is streamlining workflows, making the enactment much businesslike each day.

The accelerated adoption of AI and data-driven workloads astatine hyperscalers is driving robust request for our products and solutions. To fulfill the request of much exabytes of storage, our customers are progressively transitioning to higher capableness drives. Shipments of our latest ePMR products offering up to 26 terabytes CMR and 32-terabyte UltraSMR capacities proceed to turn astatine an awesome pace, surpassing 2.2 cardinal units successful the September quarter. Our quality to reliably standard our ePMR exertion and modulation customers to higher capableness drives is 1 of respective ways we enactment the increasing request for exabytes. We are besides investing successful caput wafer and media exertion and capableness to thrust areal density higher.