Hyperscalers Buy Out Hard Drive Supply for 2026 as AI Demand Soars
Feb 22nd 2026
Seagate and Western Digital say their 2026 HDD production is fully allocated to large cloud customers, leaving little open supply for other buyers and squeezing enterprise and midmarket storage plans.
- Seagate and Western Digital report nearline HDD capacity fully allocated through 2026 with long term deals into 2027 and beyond.
- Major cloud providers and AI datacenter projects are the primary buyers absorbing available high capacity drives.
- Mid size enterprises and standard server deployments face shortages and likely price increases for HDDs.
- Shortages of DRAM, NAND flash SSDs and CPUs tied to AI demand are compounding infrastructure supply constraints.
- Analysts forecast the top ten cloud providers will account for more than 70 percent of server capex and AI optimized servers for about 80 percent of server spend.