WDC stock is up 333% year to date after Western Digital posted 45% year-over-year revenue growth in its fiscal 2026 third quarter, driven by enterprise hard disk drives. For shareholders, the number points to a storage business that is still expanding as AI demand feeds more data creation and more demand for persistent storage.
45% year-over-year revenue growth came from enterprise hard disk drives, and Western Digital also delivered 11% sequential revenue growth in the same quarter. Irving Tan said, "Virtually every AI workload, from training, inference, agentic AI to physical AI, creates data that is stored persistently and cost-efficiently on HDDs."
Irving Tan and HDD demand
11% sequential revenue growth followed the quarter’s AI-linked storage demand, while Western Digital projected $3.65 billion in fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter revenue. That projection implies 9.4% sequential growth, giving the stock a fresh benchmark instead of a one-quarter pop.
809 planned data centers remain part of the backdrop for storage demand, and Grand View Research pegs a 30.6% compound annual growth rate through 2033. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in said AI was "lighting up every part of the business."
Western Digital versus Sandisk
333% year-to-date gain looks strong until it is set beside Sandisk’s 820% year-to-date surge in the S&P 500. That gap shows Western Digital is participating in the memory-stock rally, but it is not the most aggressively priced name in the group.
Western Digital’s setup now turns on whether HDD demand keeps tracking AI build-outs fast enough to support the $3.65 billion fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter target. If that storage demand holds, the current run has room; if it does not, the stock must justify a 333% move with more than one quarter of acceleration.
