Over the past few months, the AI industry’s obsession with building expensive data centers has caused the price of RAM to skyrocket, turning a simple computer upgrade into an expensive investment.
And while there are some early glimpses of hope RAM prices are now falling across the pondThe next AI price increase may instead affect a different component: the hard drive.
Recently during a company earnings callIrving Tan, CEO of hard drive maker Western Digital, acknowledged that “we’re pretty much sold out for calendar 2026.”
As PC World Let’s tellTan was referring to the company’s production capacity as part of its effort to allocate available inventory to its customers.
While Western Digital hard drives will remain on shelves for now, prices may soon follow in the footsteps of RAM graphical processing units Because the hype around generic AI is dominating the markets – and spooking investors.
“As AI capabilities expand, cloud also continues to grow, driving both exploration and demand for high-density storage solutions,” Tan told investors. “In this new era where AI and cloud dominate, Western Digital has taken a customer-centric approach to manage this strong demand by working closely with our hyperscale customers, ensuring we provide reliable, high-capacity drives at scale to give them the best performance and total cost of ownership.”
Sales figures tell a clear story: Less than 90 percent of the company’s revenue comes from cloud storage. The hyperscalers Tan was referring to are cloud computing and data management services that require access to huge data centers for both data processing and storage.
The huge demand from AI industry players has already hit the hard drive market hard. in November, Tom’s Hardware informed The hard drives were on backorder for two years following a large investment in AI data centers.
Tan’s comments will probably do nothing to reassure consumers. Between September and January, average hard drive prices had already increased There was a huge increase of 46 percent.
More information on RAM prices: AI is making data center RAM extremely expensive, causing the prices of laptops, tablets and gaming PCs to skyrocket.
