Western Digital Q1 Revenue Rises 55% to $4.38B, Guides Q2 to $5.1B
Western Digital reported fiscal Q1 revenue of $4.38 billion, up 55% from a year earlier, and guided Q2 to $5.1 billion on cloud and AI storage demand. The board raised its dividend 17%.
2 min readAI-assisted
Western Digital's fiscal Q1 results and Q2 guidance, from the company's earnings release.
Illustration (AI-generated)
Western Digital reported fiscal first-quarter 2027 revenue of $4,381 million on Oct 22, up 55% from a year earlier and up 17% from the previous quarter, according to the company's earnings release filed with the SEC.
Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share were $4.64 and GAAP diluted EPS was $4.63. Gross margin was 58.1% on a non-GAAP basis and 57.8% on a GAAP basis. Operating cash flow was $1,604 million and free cash flow was $1,377 million for the quarter, which ended Oct 2, 2026.
For the fiscal second quarter, Western Digital guided non-GAAP revenue to $5.1 billion, plus or minus $100 million, which it said would be up 66% to 72% from a year earlier. It expects a non-GAAP gross margin of 60% to 61% and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $5.80, plus or minus $0.20. The board raised the quarterly dividend 17% to $0.175 per share, payable Dec 17.
Why Hard-Drive Pricing Matters for Data Centers
Revenue grew 55% against 22% for exabytes shipped; the exabyte growth is StockTitan's calculation from the company presentation, not a company disclosure.
Illustration (AI-generated)
The release does not break out exabytes or pricing, but StockTitan, citing the company's earnings presentation, put shipments at 248 exabytes, up 22% from 204 exabytes a year earlier. StockTitan divided revenue by exabytes shipped to put average sales per terabyte at $17.67, up 28% from $13.81, and put cost per terabyte at $7.45. Those per-terabyte figures are StockTitan's calculations, not a selling price the company reported.
Revenue grew 55% while exabytes grew 22%, on StockTitan's figures, which suggests higher revenue per terabyte contributed to the jump. CFO Kris Sennesael credited both exabyte growth and improved pricing in the release. For data-center operators that buy bulk storage for AI training data and model archives, that would make hard-drive capacity a rising cost line beside the GPU and memory budget, though the company does not frame it that way.
StockTitan reported that cloud customers accounted for 88% of sales in the quarter, without saying where that share comes from, and that the presentation credited growth to cloud and AI workloads. It noted that the figures do not single out AI. CEO Irving Tan said the company is executing through its technology transitions to meet growing demand for storage.
What Western Digital Has Not Confirmed Yet
The release does not say how much of the growth comes from AI workloads as opposed to other cloud demand, and it gives no exabyte or price-per-terabyte figures of its own. The Q2 outlook is guidance, not a result. Next-quarter margin and the pace of capacity additions will show whether pricing holds.
