February 17, 2026
AI ate your hard drive
WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
Big Tech bought all the storage; home labs told to wait
TLDR: Cloud giants pre-bought most hard drives for 2026 to stock AI data centers, pushing up HDD and SSD prices and leaving regular buyers scrambling. Commenters joke about hoarding tape decks, warn CPUs could be next, and argue whether this is AI greed or just capitalism squeezing home labs.
The internet is in full meltdown over news that Western Digital (link) and Seagate (link) have essentially sold out hard drives for all of 2026, with cloud giants locking down supplies for AI data hoards. Commenters say the message to regular buyers is clear: “get in line.” One joker imagined “Future Show HN” tutorials on gaming off 100 tape drives because disks are gone, while another cracked that we’re witnessing “/dev/null as a service” going to the moon.
Under the hood: big clouds like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI have long-term deals through 2027 and even 2028. Seagate admits server‑focused drives are fully booked, and they’re not adding factories—just cramming more data onto each disk. Result? Retail is starved, and prices are up—HDDs by 20–50% since mid‑2025, while some SSDs jumped 50% to 2–3× for smaller brands. One commenter raged at a “hyper‑scaler mafia,” another sighed: first GPUs, then RAM, now disks—are CPUs next? Meanwhile, WD’s profits are soaring, which only fuels the outrage.
The thread split between “AI ate our storage” and “this is normal supply-and-demand.” Some optimists even cheered that tight memory might finally force devs to ditch bloated apps and write leaner code again. But the prevailing vibe? If you’re a home‑server tinkerer, 2026 is looking like a long, empty drive bay.
Key Points
- •Western Digital and Seagate report their HDD production for 2026 is fully or almost fully allocated, with similar conditions likely at Toshiba.
- •Long-term contracts extend into 2027–2028, driven by hyperscaler demand (Amazon/AWS, Google, Microsoft/Azure, Meta, OpenAI) for AI data center storage.
- •Seagate’s nearline HDDs now comprise 87% of its HDD sales; capacity is fully booked through 2026, and it is not expanding production capacity.
- •Western Digital’s Q4 2025 revenue rose 25% to $3B with higher margins, reflecting higher prices; all three HDD makers recently increased sales and profits.
- •HDD shortages are pushing up retail prices for HDDs (20–50% in Germany) and SSDs (up to ~50% for ≤2 TB; 2–3x for smaller brands), with WD SSDs transitioning to SanDisk branding.