{"id":49516,"date":"2026-05-29T11:35:24","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T11:35:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/29\/investors-chasing-micron-may-be-missing-this-storage-stocks-record-run\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T11:35:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T11:35:24","slug":"investors-chasing-micron-may-be-missing-this-storage-stocks-record-run","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/29\/investors-chasing-micron-may-be-missing-this-storage-stocks-record-run\/","title":{"rendered":"Investors chasing Micron may be missing this storage stock\u2019s record run"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Western Digital stock (NASDAQ: WDC) has quietly became one of Wall Street\u2019s strongest AI-storage trades this year.<\/p>\n

While Micron remains the obvious name for investors chasing the memory boom<\/a>, Western Digital has staged a sharper and less discussed turnaround.<\/p>\n

The hard-drive maker\u2019s stock is up roughly 200% in 2026, recently trading near record highs, after a run of results that challenged old assumptions about the storage business.<\/p>\n

The headline number from its latest quarter was not just growth, it was profitability as Western Digital\u2019s non-GAAP gross margin crossed 50% for the first time.<\/p>\n

A margin milestone years in the making<\/h2>\n

Western Digital\u2019s fiscal third-quarter results gave investors a clear reason to revisit the story.<\/p>\n

Revenue rose 45% from a year earlier to $3.3 billion. That is strong growth, especially for one long viewed as cyclical and tied to the slower-moving hard-drive market.<\/p>\n

The margin expansion was the real surprise. Non-GAAP gross margin reached 50.5%, up more than 10 percentage points from a year earlier.<\/p>\n

Adjusted earnings per share came in at $2.72, almost double last year\u2019s level. <\/p>\n

The demand driver is not complicated, as AI systems create and store huge amounts of data. That data has to live somewhere, and high-capacity hard disk drives remain one of the cheapest ways to store it at scale.<\/p>\n

Western Digital said exabytes sold rose 34% year over year, while average selling price per exabyte increased 9%.<\/p>\n

In plain terms, the company shipped more storage and earned more for each unit of capacity. <\/p>\n

Its cloud business now accounts for nearly 90% of revenue, showing how far the company has moved away from the old consumer-PC storage cycle.<\/p>\n

Wall Street is taking notice<\/h2>\n

Analysts have been quick to adjust.<\/p>\n

Evercore ISI raised its price target on Western Digital to $575 from $410 this week, while keeping an Outperform rating.<\/p>\n

The firm said Western Digital and the hard-drive industry remain \u201ccritical and still underappreciated\u201d parts of the AI infrastructure buildout.<\/p>\n

Barclays went even higher, lifting its target to $620 from $450 and maintaining an Overweight rating.<\/p>\n

Its view is that memory and storage remain the most attractive part of the semiconductor group below AI accelerators, with pricing upside likely to continue as supply remains tight.<\/p>\n

Mizuho has also joined the chorus, raising its target to $550 from $470 with an Outperform rating.<\/p>\n

Across Wall Street, the consensus remains positive. Current data show 23 analysts covering the stock, with a Buy rating and an average 12-month target of about $518.<\/p>\n

Western Digital’s rally reflects growing confidence that AI-driven storage demand is becoming a more important earnings driver. <\/p>\n

Analysts continue to raise targets as cloud customers invest in the infrastructure needed to support increasingly data-intensive AI workloads.<\/p>\n

The post Investors chasing Micron may be missing this storage stock\u2019s record run<\/a> appeared first on Invezz<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Western Digital stock (NASDAQ: WDC) has quietly became one of Wall Street\u2019s strongest AI-storage trades this year. While Micron remains the obvious name for investors chasing the memory boom, Western Digital has staged a sharper and less discussed turnaround. The hard-drive maker\u2019s stock is up roughly 200% in 2026, recently trading near record highs, after <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49517,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-investing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quickassetsmarket.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}