Western Digital Slips 2.7% as AI Storage Rally Cools After Record Cash and Guidance

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Western Digital Corp. shares fell about 2.7% to $469.42 on Thursday, down $12.86 from Wednesday's close, as investors locked in gains after a year that turned hard-disk drives into an AI trade.

The stock had finished Wednesday at $482.28 and Sept. 8 at $477.30. The 52-week range still runs from about $93 to nearly $800. After-hours prints around $466 on Thursday morning showed the same fade. Nothing in the company's last official release changed overnight. The tape was digesting how far the story had already run.

That story is fiscal 2026. For the year ended July 3, Western Digital reported $12.92 billion of revenue, up 36% from $9.52 billion. Non-GAAP earnings more than doubled. Free cash flow was $3.51 billion, up 145%, a 27% margin on sales. The company returned $3.1 billion through dividends and buybacks and ended the year in a net cash position. Capital spending was $418 million.

The fourth quarter did the heavy lifting. Revenue was $3.75 billion, up 44% from a year earlier and above a $3.69 billion Street view. Non-GAAP earnings were $3.56 a share versus a $3.29 consensus. GAAP earnings were $8.21 a share. Non-GAAP gross margin reached 54.4%. Operating cash flow was $1.39 billion. Free cash flow was $1.28 billion, a 34% margin. The stock still dropped more than 5% in regular trading the day of the report and another 11% after hours, a classic sell-the-news print after a multi-hundred-percent climb.

Chief Executive Irving Tan called it a year of "strong performance." "In our fiscal fourth quarter, revenue increased 44% year over year, gross and operating margins expanded, and earnings per share more than doubled," he said in the Aug. 5 release. "These results reflect our ability to scale innovation and operational excellence across our global organization, supporting our customers' growing storage demand." On the call he framed the demand as compounding, not cyclical. "While compute cycles can be reused, data compounds." He said the largest AI platforms process "tens of billions of tokens per minute and billions of prompts per day." "Today, roughly 80% of data stored in a hyperscale data center resides on hard disk drives. That is likely to continue."

Chief Financial Officer Kris Sennesael pointed to cash. "Fiscal 2026 was an outstanding year for WD, characterized by broadening demand, deeper customer engagement, and disciplined execution across all end markets," he said. "As the cloud and other data-intensive workloads continue to expand, we remain confident in the long-term growth trajectory of our business, further margin expansion, and strong free cash flow generation." First-quarter fiscal 2027 guidance, at the midpoint: $4.1 billion of revenue plus or minus $100 million, non-GAAP gross margin of 55% to 56%, operating expenses of $390 million to $400 million, a 17% tax rate and non-GAAP earnings of $4.00 plus or minus 15 cents on about 388 million diluted shares. That implies 42% to 49% year-over-year sales growth.

The product roadmap is the other half of the premium. Management said 40-terabyte ePMR drives should be more than half of nearline exabytes by the third quarter of fiscal 2027. A 44-terabyte HAMR drive is slated to ship in the first half of calendar 2027, with 50-terabyte drives later that year. The long-term map now runs past 100 terabytes. Tan has said future exabyte growth should "consistently exceed 25%," driven by training data, synthetic data and the feedback loop of physical AI. Long-term customer agreements now stretch toward 2029 and, in at least one hyperscale case, through 2031.

The board declared a 15-cent quarterly dividend payable Sept. 17 to holders of record Sept. 8. Management has said the capital-return formula is unchanged: excess free cash flow through dividends and buybacks, while spending on heads, media and automation rather than adding unit-capacity plants.

Analyst targets published this week still span $428 to $900, with an average near $650. That spread is the argument in one line. Bears see a 19-times trailing multiple on a company that already printed 54% gross margin and a 34% free-cash-flow quarter, plus a stock that more than quintupled off last year's low. Bulls see a scarce bit factory in a market where memory prices are tight, cloud capex is still rising and 80% of hyperscale bits still sit on spinning disks.

Thursday's $469 print is closer to the post-earnings after-hours low than to the $519 close on report day. It is also still a multiple of the price that prevailed before AI storage became a ticker. Western Digital is no longer a turnaround. It is a capacity-constrained supplier asking investors to pay for visibility through the end of the decade. The 2.7% dip does not rewrite the guidance. It asks whether $4.00 of next-quarter earnings is already in the rearview mirror at $469.