WDC Earnings Call

OperatorGood afternoon and welcome to the Western Digital's Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2026 Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Ambrish Srivastava, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Ambrish SrivastavaThank you and good afternoon, everyone. Joining me today are Irving Tan, WD's Chief Executive Officer, and Kris Sennesael, WD's Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements based on management's current assumptions and expectations, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements include expectations for our product portfolio, our business plans and performance, ongoing market trends, and our future financial results. We assume no obligation to update these statements. Please refer to our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our other filings with the SEC for more information on the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. In our prepared remarks, our comments will be related to non-GAAP results on a continuing operations basis, unless stated otherwise.

Ambrish SrivastavaReconciliations between the non-GAAP and comparable GAAP financial measures are included in the press release and other materials that are being posted in the Investor Relations section of our website at investor.wdc.com. Lastly, I want to note that when we refer to we, us, our, or similar terms, we are referring only to Western Digital as a company and not speaking on behalf of the industry. With that, I will now turn the call over to Irving for introductory remarks. Irving?

Irving TanThanks, Ambrish. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Let me begin by reflecting on our first full fiscal year of WD as a focused, pure-play HDD company. We drove strong year-on-year revenue growth of 36%, while expanding our gross and operating margins significantly. We doubled EPS, generated $3.5 billion in free cash flow, and strengthened our balance sheet to a net positive cash position while continuing to make significant capital returns to shareholders. These strong financial results are an outcome of meeting our customers' growing storage demand by focusing on innovation and driving operational excellence across the global WD organization. We enter fiscal year 2027 with robust customer demand, increased visibility, and continued confidence in the durability of demand, as well as our ability to service this demand with our industry-leading products and technology roadmap.

Irving TanDemand for storage is being driven both by AI as well as by core cloud services. Within the AI infrastructure market, there is a key dynamic taking shape. While compute cycles can be reused, data compounds. Training and inference workloads share and reuse compute resources over time. Yet the data generated by these workloads, including model inputs, outputs, logs, and retained context, continues to accumulate. As AI usage scales, this creates a growing need for storage infrastructure capable of economically storing and managing these massive datasets. The inflection we have discussed in the past, from AI training to inference to agentic AI, has only become more pronounced. Training models creates significant initial data requirements, but inference generates and retains data continuously. Today, the largest AI platforms process tens of billions of tokens per minute and billions of prompts per day.

Irving TanCreating a rapidly expanding body of data that must be stored, managed, and accessed over time. Recent disclosures show token volumes growing several-fold year over year, underscoring the pace at which inference is scaling. Meanwhile, AI is moving rapidly from merely answering questions to agentic AI that does the work, coordinating tasks, accessing data, and operating continuously across multi-step workflows. This transition creates a fundamentally more data-intensive workload, and one that is increasingly persistent rather than transient. The storage implications are significant. Agents generate data at every step of a workflow, increasing both the volume of data created and the amount that must be stored over time. This is why we continue to view agentic AI as a structural and step-function driver of capacity-orientated storage demand.

Irving TanBeyond inference and agentic AI, we are also seeing the emergence of physical AI— autonomous vehicles, robotics, and industrial automation systems and humanoids— where the volume of real-world data needed to train these systems is insufficient, thereby requiring the generation and storage of synthetic datasets, creating another driver of storage demand. Infrastructure investment is important, but it's only the beginning. Training creates the initial data foundation. Inference generates data continuously. Agentic systems multiply the volume and frequency of that data. And physical AI accelerates the cycle further. Together, these trends create a more durable demand environment for data storage, driven not just by building AI infrastructure, but by the continuous creation and retention of data once that infrastructure is deployed.

Irving TanAs AI workloads move from deployment to sustained use, storage demand becomes less about the one-time infrastructure build cycle and more about the compounding of data. That is the underlying secular demand growth driver for our business. Today, roughly 80% of data stored in a hyperscale data centre resides on hard disk drives. That is likely to continue. That reflects what HDDs do exceptionally well— delivering the scale, economics, and power efficiency required for long retention large-scale data storage. Let me now turn to why these secular growth drivers play to WD's strengths. WD's robust technology roadmap is based on the industry-leading areal density per platter with a focus on innovation to meet our customers' capacity needs at scale, along with our growing ability to meet their requirements by providing cost-effective storage solutions in additional layers of the AI storage stack. We are on track to ship our 44TB HAMR product in the first half of calendar year 2027.

Irving TanCustomer feedback on the qualification process continues to be very positive, with the capacity, performance, and reliability of our drives exceeding customer expectations. For our next-generation 40TB ePMR drives, we commenced shipments in our June quarter and are now entering volume production with 2 customers. We are currently ramping our UltraSMR technology with a 3rd major customer, and we expect that UltraSMR will make up around 60% of our nearline exabyte shipments as we exit fiscal 2027. Since our last update, we have continued to broaden our customer engagement and qualification pipeline with additional hyperscale and cloud customers advancing through qualification and deployment planning.

Irving TanBeyond capacity, we are also extending innovation into new layers of the AI storage stack. We are making progress on improving drive performance with our high-bandwidth drives and are now sampling with 5 customers. We are targeting up to 8 times the throughput of today's drives. Without a corresponding increase in power draw—exactly the kind of performance AI workloads require. In closing, the opportunity in front of us is real, and at WD, we are well positioned to capture it. Data creation isn't slowing, it's accelerating. And as the value of data grows, so does the infrastructure storage requirements to store, manage, and protect it. That's a durable, long-term tailwind for our business. And we intend to fully capitalise on it. Our technology roadmap is strong, our customer relationships are deep, and we have the operational discipline to translate this opportunity into sustained earnings and free cash flow growth and long-term shareholder value.

Irving TanWith that, let me hand it over to Kris to walk you through the financials and our outlook for Q1.

Kris SennesaelThank you, Irving, and good afternoon, everyone. Fiscal 2026 was an outstanding year for WD. Driven by broadening demand, deepening customer engagements, and disciplined execution. We grew revenue 36% to $12.9 billion, while expanding gross margins 970 basis points to 49.1% and increasing operating margins by 1,290 basis points to 37.3%. We more than doubled earnings per share to $10.22. And we generated $3.5 billion of free cash flow, delivering a robust 27% free cash flow margin. We returned $3.1 billion to shareholders, reflecting our confidence in the durability of the business and our commitment to long-term value creation. Let me now turn to our fourth quarter of fiscal '26. Revenue came in at $3.75 billion, up 44% year over year, on the back of strong exabyte growth and favorable pricing dynamics. Earnings per share grew 109% year over year to $3.56. Revenue, gross margin, and EPS all came in at or above the high end of the guidance range.

Kris SennesaelWe delivered 231 exabytes to our customers, up 22% year over year. Nearline continued to drive our exabyte growth, complemented by solid non-nearline exabyte growth in the quarter. We began shipping the next-generation ePMR drives with capacities up to 40 terabytes in our fiscal fourth quarter and expect a strong ramp over the next few quarters. Cloud represented 89% of total revenue at $3.3 billion. Up 43% year over year, as demand for our high-capacity nearline products was strong with a favorable pricing environment. Client represented 6% of total revenue at $225 million, up 61% year over year. Consumer represented 5% of revenue at $187 million, up 38% year over year. Both segments benefited from improved pricing. Gross margin expanded 1,310 basis points year-over-year to 54.4%, resulting in strong year-over-year incremental gross margin. This was driven by a mix shift towards higher-capacity drives, favorable pricing across our portfolio, and disciplined execution in our manufacturing operations.

Kris SennesaelDuring the quarter, the blended average year-over-year price increase per terabyte improved from high single digits last quarter to high teens this quarter, reflecting the impact of our predictable and sustainable pricing strategy as we deliver greater value to our customers. Operating expenses were $382 million, or approximately 10% of revenue, a 170 basis point sequential improvement, demonstrating further operating leverage in the model. Strong top-line growth, expanding gross margins, and leverage in the model drove operating income to $1.66 billion, up 126% year-over-year, translating into a durable operating margin of 44.2%, up 1,610 basis points, year-over-year. Interest and other expenses were $10 million, and our effective tax rate was 16%. Taking into account the diluted share count of 388 million shares, earnings per share was $3.56, an increase of 109% year-over-year. Operating cash flow was $1.4 billion, and CapEx was $108 million.

Kris SennesaelThis resulted in free cash flow generation of $1.3 billion for the quarter and a strong free cash flow margin of 34%. During the quarter, we completed the monetization of the remaining 1.7 million shares of SanDisk, exchanging them for 4.8 million WD shares. Additionally, we repurchased 2.3 million shares of our common stock for a total of $1 billion. Our full year and fourth quarter repurchase numbers that we are describing on this call include $328 million to settle the conversion premium for some of our converts in cash rather than in stock, avoiding the issuance of roughly 773,000 new shares. We also made $54 million of dividend payments And we ended the quarter with $1.1 billion of debt and $1.6 billion of cash, resulting in a net positive cash position of $500 million. Lastly, the board has declared a cash dividend of $0.15 per share of our common stock, which will be paid on September 17, 2026, to our shareholders of record as of September 8, 2026.

Kris SennesaelI will now turn to the outlook for the first quarter of fiscal 2027. We continue to operate in a strong demand environment with improving longer-term visibility and favorable pricing dynamics across our cloud, consumer, and client end markets. We expect revenue to be $4.1 billion, plus minus $100 million. At midpoint, this reflects a a growth of 45% year over year. Gross margin is expected to be in the range of 55% to 56%. We anticipate operating expenses in the range of $390 million to $400 million. Interest and other expenses are expected to be $15 million. The tax rate is expected to be 17%. As a result, we expect diluted earnings per share to be $4.00 plus minus $0.15 based on a non-GAAP diluted share count of 388 million shares. As we look ahead, we have high conviction in the drivers of demand. AI, cloud, and the proliferation of data-intensive workloads continue to accelerate. On the supply side, our industry-leading technology and product roadmaps, combined with strong operational execution enable us to deliver substantially more exabytes to our customers.

Kris SennesaelThis does not require spending CapEx to add unit capacity, but we are making the necessary investments in our heads and media operations, as well as in automation to increase our productivity. In summary, durable demand, disciplined supply, and expanding margins position us to deliver sustained earnings growth, strong free cash flow, and long-term shareholder value. With that, let's now begin the Q&A. Ambrish.

Ambrish SrivastavaThank you, Kris. Operator, you can now open the line to questions, please. And to ensure that we hear from as many analysts as possible, please ask one question at a time. After we respond, we will give you an opportunity to ask one follow-up question.

OperatorOperator. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster.

OperatorAnd our first question comes from CJ Muse from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.

CJ MuseYeah, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. It's hard not to compare your results with your main competitor where they're seeing better sequential top line growth and targeting gross margins nearly 200 bps higher than your September guide. So curious, what would you make of this? Is that due to their earlier ramp of HAMR? Is it a difference in timing of contracts? Perhaps you're selling fewer bits into the open market. We'd love to hear your thoughts there and how you think about kind of gross margin acceleration from here. Do we need to kind of wait for HAMR in calendar '27? Or are there other drivers that can allow you to push higher? Thank you.

Irving TanThanks for the question, CJ. There are always quarter-to-quarter variations in terms of gross margin because there's a whole range of factors that go into driving it. Obviously, timing of pricing in relation to long-term agreement contracts is one. So there will always be timing differences on when existing LTAs expire and new LTAs kick in with different pricing regimes. So that's one factor. Second will be the introduction of next-generation platforms. So we're very excited that we started shipping in Q4 already our up to 40TB ePMR drives. Right now, we are very much on track to hit 50% of nearline bits on that platform by third quarter of fiscal year '27. So that will again, will drive our ability to ship more higher-capacity drives into the marketplace and provide some additional upside opportunity from pricing as well. And obviously, we continue to work on operational efficiencies like we normally do.

Irving TanSo in short, there will always be quarter-to-quarter variations, but we feel very confident with the things that I mentioned in terms of the pricing structures that we have put in place with LTAs the introduction of our higher-cap drives coming out in the second half of the year, and our ongoing operational efficiencies that will lead to stronger exabyte growth, continuous top-line growth, and obviously ongoing margin expansion.

Ambrish SrivastavaDo you have a quick follow-up, CJ, which wouldn't be a multi-part question, please? Thank you.

CJ MuseYeah, of course. You know, Marvell hosted this session at Flash Memory Summit talking about the economically indispensable nature of HDDs in the AI data center. So curious with that as a backdrop, how has your visibility kind of improved? And how do you think it could improve further as you start signing contracts that renew? Thanks so much.

Irving TanYeah, thanks for the question, CJ. Look, I think we have strong visibility and increasingly strong visibility. It's being customer-driven to a large degree as well. The last time we reported on LTAs, we talked about having it one LTA of a large customer all the way up to calendar '29. But we're very much in the throes of discussions with customers to establish LTAs for calendar '29, '30, and '31 as well. So visibility remains very strong. Customer-driven demand for LTAs extending all the way out to '31 remains very strong. So we continue to work on them. I think we have very good line of sight in terms of the Exabyte demand. What we're working through with them is more in terms of the pricing commercial construct or what those LTAs would look like going forward.

OperatorAnd our next question comes from Amit Daryanani from Evercore. Please go ahead.

Amit DaryananiThanks for taking my question. I guess maybe the first one is Exabyte shipments were up about 21%, I think, year over year to 231. That's below the 30% Exabyte growth you folks have had the last several quarters. Can you just talk about, is this a temporary pause related to timing or supply? Or does this represent a more normalized growth rate? And how should we think about exabyte growth through fiscal '27?

Irving TanYeah, I mean, I think what we've guided to is an exabyte— we see demand growing at above 25%, right, 25% plus going forward. So we clearly have a roadmap that's designed to support that. There will, again, as I mentioned, similar to margins, be quarter-to-quarter fluctuations in terms of exabyte growth rates depending on the mix of products that we ship. And then as we move into the second half of the year, as we really ramp up the 40-terabyte shipments, as I mentioned, that will be over 50% of the nearline Exabytes we ship, we expect Exabyte growth rate to accelerate. And then obviously, we have HAMR coming on in the second half of the year and into calendar '27 as well at the 44-terabyte level. Yeah.

Kris SennesaelAnd just to add, I think in Q4, Exabyte shipments were up 22% year-over-year. And when you look at it on a full fiscal year '26, exabytes were up 25% year over year.

Ambrish SrivastavaDo you have a follow-up, Amit?

Amit DaryananiI do. Thanks a lot, Ambrish. Just on the pricing side, right, price per terabyte went up pretty dramatically, high teens year over year. Kris, I think you talked about this. Can you just talk about how do you think pricing is going to keep evolving from here and maybe specifically the new LTA that you folks are signing? Are they enabling this kind of heightened pricing, or is there more upside as we go forward? Thank you very much.

Irving TanAmit, I think we were beneficiaries of across-the-board pricing improvements, both in terms of our nearline products and obviously in the client and consumer space as well. In terms of the nearline, especially with our large customers, we've been very consistent in talking about predictable pricing. And that's a strategy we continue to adopt. This will give them visibility to ensure that they can make long-term architectural decisions with the right economics to underpin that. So— but even then, as we increase higher capacity drives, we provide better TCO value to them. That gives us an opportunity to increase pricing. But you'll see that on a very predictable basis going forward. In terms of the non-nearline space, particularly in our kind of client and consumer space, we saw a higher opportunity to increase pricing, predominantly driven by the pricing structures on alternative products that are flash-based as well.

Irving TanSo that resulted in a slightly higher pricing environment. Kris, you want to— anything you want to add to that?

Kris SennesaelNo, I think you summarized it well.

OperatorThe next question comes from Aaron Rakers from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Aaron RakersYeah, thanks for taking the question. I guess kind of building on the prior two questions, you know, it seems to me like you've got a product transition dynamic going on with the 40-terabyte ePMR drives.

Aaron RakersIf I look at your cost structure, it looks like you saw a cost per terabyte that was more maybe flattish, down a little bit sequential. So I'm curious, as we move through this product transition, how should we think about cost per terabyte or cost of goods sold per terabyte progressing through '27?

Kris SennesaelYeah. So Aaron, the cost per terabyte in Q4 of fiscal '26, the quarter that we reported, was down approximately 8% year over year. We've indicated before that cost per terabyte in the long term will come down on or about 10% year over year. And, you know, the main driver, as Irving already explained, right, is the move to higher capacity drives, better areal density, which gives us a substantial reduction on a cost per terabyte. And as we execute in the near, mid, and long term, execute on our technology roadmap, execute on our product roadmap, introduce the next generation ePMR and introduce our HAMR products into the market, we will over time continue to see cost per terabyte coming down.

Ambrish SrivastavaYeah. Do you have a follow-up, Aaron?

Aaron RakersI do. Maybe, Kris, back to you. You've done a lot on the balance sheet, right? You've got a $1.1 billion left on kind of the debt. You've got $1.6 billion in the cash. I'm just curious, how are you thinking about the capital structure from here? Is it pretty much 100% free cash flow return? Do you want to put more debt on the balance sheet? I'm just curious, any updated thoughts on that?

Kris SennesaelThank you. Yeah, no change there to our strategy and our commitment to return the free cash flow back to the shareholders consistently with what we have been doing over the last 4 or 5 quarters through a combination of our dividend payments as well as our share repurchases. And so we're fully committed to those 2 programs.

OperatorAnd our next question comes from Wamsi Milhan from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Wamsi MohanHi, yes, thank you so much. I was wondering, Irving, just if you could maybe drill down a little bit on the mix comment that you made in the answer to one of the prior questions on the 22% exabyte growth, because we previously expected that there was room to deliver more exabytes in the quarter and the deceleration seems pretty strong. So I was hoping maybe you can double-click a little bit on your mix comment and at the same time, your expecting obviously an acceleration here in your comments, both on sort of a macro level as well as, you know, from your product cadence perspective. So anything you could give us in terms of what is changing in that mix very specifically, which caused maybe the slower growth in the quarter? I mean, 22% is pretty strong, but like definitely a deceleration and then further acceleration. Like, is there a near-term cap on that before you maybe start to ramp hammer?

Irving TanYeah. So thanks for the question, Wamsi. You know, a lot of it, as you know well, we have very large customers. And so different customers take different types of technology. So if there's a particular customer in a particular quarter that takes a bit more CMR products, obviously that will mean we ship a few fewer bits into the marketplace for the number of units that we have, right?. So in a different quarter where we have customers that are more UltraSMR heavy and for the same number of units, we're able to deliver much more Exabytes into the marketplace. So there'll always be variations quarter to quarter and they don't buy on a very linear basis. It's a bit lumpy. So you will see sort of quarter-to-quarter variations within that. But, you know, from a medium to long-term trajectory, we feel very confident about the ongoing Exabyte growth, the ability to hit that 25%+ growth trajectory that we shared, both in terms of the 40TB ePMR that we're ramping up very aggressively.

Irving TanThen obviously we have the 44TB HAMR coming out in the first half of calendar '27, which will ramp. And then obviously we've indicated in our roadmap we will have 50TB products coming out towards the second half of calendar '27.

Wamsi MohanOkay, okay, that's helpful, Irving. Thank you. And then if I could just follow up, um, You know, when you look at your quarter-on-quarter gross margins from your guidance, and not to beat a dead horse here, but year-on-year you still are suggesting pretty strong incrementals. I get that. But is there anything specific within, again, mix and sort of pricing dynamic that is changing on a sequential basis? Or is the pricing dynamic something that should persist and it's more about just sort of the mix that's creating maybe not further upside to the gross margins?

Kris SennesaelYeah, Wamsi. So definitely, there is, again, quarter-to-quarter, there's going to be variations. That's why I'm not really fixated on my sequential incremental gross margins. I look more on my incremental gross margins on a year-over-year basis. And just to To put some numbers around that, right, in fiscal '25, on a full-year basis, our incremental gross margin was 60%. In fiscal '26, the fiscal year that we just ended, incremental gross margins were 75% year over year, ending in Q4 with incremental gross margin year over year, 84%, 85%. And implied in the guide for Q1 is a year-over-year incremental gross margin of 80%, 81%. So I think we're executing really well on driving incremental gross margins, further improving the gross margins. I have high conviction that we will continue to improve gross margins for many quarters going forward based on everything what we've explained. There is very strong demand.

Kris SennesaelWe are moving to higher capacity drives. That provides more value to our customers and that enables us to increase our price per terabyte while at the same time driving down the cost per terabyte. And I think that's a great recipe for further gross margins improvements.

OperatorOur next question comes from Krish Sankar from TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Krish SankarHi, thanks for taking my question. First one, Irving, you know, clearly your pricing is improving pretty well. You kind of mentioned customers asking for LTAs into 2029, '30, '31. I'm just wondering, with 90% of your bids going into cloud and most of them in LTAs and those LTAs extending longer, the velocity of price increases that we have seen going from high single digits to high teens last quarter and probably 20% in September quarter, would that slow down because most are under LTAs? Or do you think there's still flexibility where the velocity of price increases could still increase?

Irving TanYes, thanks for the question. As I pointed out, I think if you talk about the cloud business, as you pointed out, quite a significant amount of it is under LTA. Obviously, not every LTA starts and ends at the same time. So we will see price adjustments from LTAs even as we go through the fiscal year, depending on when the contracts kick in with the new pricing. And that's obviously dictated by some of the new platforms we introduced into the market. And to reiterate, our whole pricing strategy there is to make sure it's predictable and we give a lot of visibility to our customers. Where we've seen a bit more ability to drive more rapid price increases has been in the non-nearline space. If we fast forward that to what we're looking at in terms of what we're discussing with customers on '29, '30, '31, we've— you know, we're working through the specific commercial constructs of the LTAs, but we have a good line of sight and visibility to the volume requirements of our customers that sort of further strengthen our conviction on that 25%+ exabyte growth.

Irving TanWhat we're working through is the pricing regime of how we would effect that for those years going forward. So in short, I think there's still a lot of opportunity for us to deliver more value to our customers, deliver better TCO, and be able to benefit that through pricing, as we've always stated we would do.

Ambrish SrivastavaFollow-up, Krish?

Krish SankarYeah, thanks, Ambrish. A quick follow-up for Kris. You kind of mentioned how the cost per terabyte downs are like probably like high single digits right now and it can get to like down 10% cost downs. Is that in a post-HAMR qualification world or do you think that's something you can get to by the next few quarters?

Kris SennesaelSo I have said in the past and repeated today, right, that the mid to long-term cost per terabyte decline is on or about 10% year over year. If you look at it the last couple quarters, we've been executing to that. And I have high conviction again over the longer term that we will be able to execute to that. Again, there are always going to be some variations quarter to quarter, but mid to longer term, and it's all driven by our technology, roadmap and our product transitions to higher areal density and higher capacity drives that will bring down the cost per terabyte.

OperatorOur next question comes from Asiya Merchant from Citi. Please go ahead.

Mike CadizHey, good afternoon. This is Mike Cadiz for Asiya Merchant at Citi. So my first question is that given your LTA conversations And of course the visibility that they provide. Can you perhaps talk about the types of workloads your customers are planning to accommodate, be it agentic or physical, etc., and how, if at all, the workloads differ through time from LTAs encompassing, you know, more near-term 2027 to LTAs and conversations covering '28, '29, and even '30? Just wanted to see the progressions of— of workloads from your perspective?

Irving TanSure, I think the bulk of the workloads will be the same. And you know, there are a couple of growth drivers that we see and we are definitely getting visibility from customers. One, and first of all, something that's underappreciated, you know, core cloud services continue to grow as well, especially video-driven applications. So a good example is the collaboration tools that many of us use each and every day. A lot of these video meetings that we're on are getting stored at a very increasing rate. That's driving a lot more storage demands and on core cloud services. And obviously in AI, the primary drivers over the last 24, 36 months have been model training and development. And what we're seeing now and going forward is growth driven by inference, agentic AI, And actually, we're starting to see the early innings of growth being driven by physical AI as well. And we are engaging with many large enterprise customers who are in the physical AI space, and we have good visibility in terms of the growth trajectories in those areas as well.

Irving TanSo definitely growth coming from those vectors that I just shared. And on top of that, obviously, with the introduction of our innovations like the high-bandwidth drives, that we have now sampling with 5 customers, that opens up the ability to also be able to deliver hard drive capabilities with the superior economics that it has in higher bandwidth workloads as well. So we see that also as a future driver of growth that we're very excited about, that customers are engaging very closely with us on.

Ambrish SrivastavaAnd operator, we'll go to the next caller, please.

OperatorThe next question comes from Erik Woodring from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Erik WoodringHey guys, thank you very much for taking my questions. Irving, last quarter you mentioned starting to see some interest from sovereign and near-cloud data centers for nearline drives in your systems. Can you maybe just tease that thought out a bit more now that we're 3 months beyond that comment? Just what are they buying? How price sensitive are they? How big are they? How big could they get, et cetera? And then a quick follow-up. Thanks.

Irving TanSure, Erik. So it's a great question. I think we looked at them as an opportunity and that opportunity is materializing. Today, and again, I would highlight three areas. We definitely see increasing demand from Neo Clouds. Actually, even frontier AI labs are coming to us for supply. And as I just touched on to the earlier question, physical AI companies. So, you know, we've seen very strong demand from an autonomous vehicle company for more storage as they ramp up their autonomous vehicle capabilities. We are seeing more demand for sovereigns from Neo Clouds. From AI Frontier Labs as well as they particularly see the economic benefits from hard drives and the increasing storage demands that their business models are creating as well. In terms of pricing, I would say they are— they are in the very tight supply environment that we are in. That provides us an opportunity for increased pricing leverage as well.

Ambrish SrivastavaAnd Erik, you said you had a follow-up.

Erik WoodringYeah, just a quick one, um, just a clarification, um, Irving, on your, your kind of pricing commentary. Um, is it— am I, am I correct in that you have sequential pricing escalators in some of your contracted pricing? And just given that demand is strengthened and you are adding more value to your customers now with these higher capacity drives, is it the right way to think that these pricing escalators are accelerating? Or is that maybe over-extrapolating too much? Thanks so much, guys.

Irving TanYou're probably over-extrapolating a bit too much, Erik. I would say that the LTAs obviously have a base price associated to a base volume. And then as we were able to deliver upside to our customers, that's subject to different pricing constructs. So that's generally what we've consistently said as a general construct of how the LTAs are commercially organized.

OperatorAnd the next question comes from Ben Reitzes from Melius. Please go ahead.

Ben ReitzesHey guys, thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask you, you know, given the product ramp and improving demand environment, should we expect the first quarter fiscal to represent the low point for both sequential revenue growth and incremental margins with acceleration as we move throughout the year? With regard to FY '27?

Kris SennesaelYeah, Ben, as you know, we only guide one quarter at a time.

Kris SennesaelAnd again, I think this quarter we are guiding to some strong sequential growth as well as year-over-year growth and some good incremental, strong incremental gross margins on a year-over-year basis. Again, we have, based on the strong demand environment that we see, based on our great execution on technology and product roadmap, based on the fact that we are at the beginning of a ramp of the introduction of our new generation of ePMR up to 40 terabytes, followed then by our HAMR introduction, we have high conviction that we can continue to ship a lot more exabytes at better pricing and driving down the cost over time, which will lead to continuous strong revenue growth as well as further gross margins improvement. And I'll leave it at that.

Ambrish SrivastavaDo you have a follow-up, Ben?

Ben ReitzesYeah, I just was wondering if you could tease out physical AI a little more. I mean, you know, I think that You know, what might be useful for investors is, yeah, there's a ton of training video, but also synthetic video. And you're mentioning it now more prominently than you did, I believe, in the prior quarters. And I was just wondering, you know, did something change? And how do you see that, you know, your tier being impacted by what's probably going to be a surge in both synthetic and video data used to train these things? Thanks.

Irving TanYeah, thanks for the question, Ben. Yes, we have highlighted it a bit more this quarter specifically because we're getting a lot better visibility from this space as well. I highlighted an example with autonomous vehicle player where, you know, I would say that the increase in exabyte demand from them for this calendar year— or sorry, calendar year '27— has increased multiple fold, right? So we're definitely seeing that. And if you extrapolate that by the number of players in this space, you extend that to Humanoids, you extend that to, uh, uh, Industrial Automation Systems as well. And as I highlighted in the prepared remarks, in many of these cases, um, they are generating new data from the tools and the vehicles that they are collecting data from, but it's still insufficient to train their models as well. So they're also using the existing data feeding it into AI tools to generate synthetic data to further train the models and drive reinforcement learning.

Irving TanAnd that's requiring a lot more storage data as well. So the cycle that we saw in how model training, development, inference was being created will extend into what is happening into physical AI. But it's becoming very real now, and we see that being a driver of growth '27 and beyond as well.

OperatorAnd our next question comes from Karl Ackerman from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Karl AckermanYes, thank you. I have two questions, if I may. First, how should we think about the gross margin delta today between nearline versus nonnearline? I ask because given the greater ability to raise prices in the nonnearline HDD market, I would imagine that gap closes. And then what share of these LTAs reprice for nearline over the next 12 months?

Kris SennesaelSo the gross margin between nearline, non-nearline, which includes consumer and client and all of that, it's all in the same ballpark right now in the 5 zip codes. So there's not a lot of differentiation there anymore.

Karl AckermanGot it. Okay. Thank you.

Karl AckermanIrving, you know, obviously hyperscale demand is robust. How large is on-prem enterprise now? And are you able to sign LTAs with them too? Thank you.

Irving TanYeah, thanks for the question, Karl. I would say again that the vast majority of the nearline bits that we're shipping are going to hyperscale customers. Increasingly, there's actually increased demand from enterprise OEM players in the storage space, especially as they are pivoting to more hybrid-based storage solutions where, you know, most recently they were looking at all potentially 100% flash array systems. There's a shift back towards hybrid systems that's driving more demand from us. And so we are also factoring the forward-looking requirements into the projections that we're working on in terms of supply, and that's giving us better visibility as well. And obviously our engineering teams are also working with them to be able to adopt our UltraSMR products and next-generation ePMR or HAMR products that will give them higher capacity drives and therefore more exabytes faster as well.

Karl AckermanThank you.

Ambrish SrivastavaAnd operator, we'll go to the last caller, please.

OperatorNext question is from Ananda Baruah from Loop Capital. Please go ahead.

Ananda BaruahHey, thanks guys. Thanks, Ambrish, for squeezing me in here. Um, Irving, uh, Kris, just, just was wondering what's a useful way to think about, you know, sort of the China hyperscale and the China AI lab opportunity going forward with all the activity that's been going on there?

Irving TanYeah, thanks for the question, Ananda. You know, I think the Asian market represents obviously a very exciting opportunity for us. We've clearly been hearing and seeing a lot about the proliferation of AI frontier lab models there that are open source. We think that's actually going to be good for the overall industry because that's is actually going to drive greater access to different models that will help to proliferate AI a lot more with, with superior economics. So depending on the use case, you can use different economic models to be able to drive growth and value in the different applications. But at the heart of it, whether it's the traditional frontier models that you've seen in the US that are premium-based, or some of the new open-source, more economical models, The underlying requirement is still that they're going to be able to require a lot of data to support the training of these models.

Irving TanThese models are going to generate a lot more data that requires storage for us. So we view it as a very positive because even as compute, it maybe drives greater efficiency in terms of compute and memory resources. The requirement for storage is just going to compound and grow. So we view it very positively for demand going forward.

Ambrish SrivastavaA quick follow-up, Anand?

Ananda BaruahYeah, quick one, thanks. And just dovetailing from there, the interplay between mixing up the meaningfully higher areal density points counterbalanced against— we're at the front end of inference, which is the real kind of killer use case for hard drives. And so how do you see those two things sort of impacting the supply-demand gap in the coming years?

Irving TanWell, we think the growth in inferencing will be positive in terms of the demand for higher capacity drive because inferencing is actually going to generate even more data that's required, that's going to be required to be stored both to support reinforcement learning and the fact that storing that context of data that's generated is going to be more economical than rerunning it through compute and memory resources. So we think actually as inferencing and agentic growth is going to drive even more demand for storage. And the best way to deliver that storage with superior TCO and at the fastest rate is to deliver high-capacity drives, which is definitely something we're working towards delivering to our customers.

OperatorThis concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks. Thank you.

Irving TanSo, you know, at WD, as we look ahead to our new fiscal year and beyond, We do so with a very clear sense of purpose. Our customers are counting on us to deliver storage infrastructure at scale and speed that matches the pace and adoption of AI. And we are very much ready for that challenge. We're confident that our technology leads, our execution is disciplined, and the entire WD team remains focused on delivering. So I want to really take this opportunity to thank the entire WD team for an outstanding year. To our investors and analysts for joining us today, and thank you for your time and your continued confidence in Western Digital.

OperatorThe conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.