Western Digital Corporation today announced its presence at Computex 2026 to help the industry understand that AI infrastructure is fundamentally a data system, not just a compute system. Every AI workload – from training and inference to agentic and physical AI – continuously creates data that persists, compounds, and expands over time. This dynamic is fundamentally changing how businesses must design AI infrastructure for scale.
This shift exposes the core challenge for AI builders: managing exponential data growth while maintaining performance and economic efficiency at scale. How that data is managed determines whether AI delivers lasting business value or becomes an unsustainable cost. WD is at Computex addressing this reality with a forum session keynote, booth demonstrations and new storage innovations.
WD Chief Product Officer Ahmed Shihab will discuss why AI infrastructure can no longer be designed primarily around compute performance, and why persistent data growth, tiered architectures, and infrastructure economics are becoming the defining constraints of AI at scale.
“The shift toward AI-driven workloads is placing new demands on storage systems, requiring higher throughput, greater capacity, and improved reliability across multiple tiers,” said John Chen, Vice President at TRENDFOCUS. “WD’s advancements in HDD and platform technologies reflect the kinds of innovations needed to support increasingly data-intensive AI environments at scale.”
- WD’s exhibit brings this data-centric architecture to life, demonstrating how storage underpins AI systems at scale. Visitors will see WD’s Ultrastar HDD high-capacity storage portfolio spanning UltraSMR, ePMR and HAMR. The company will also be highlighting its two industry-first advanced HDD innovations: High Bandwidth Drive Technology and Dual Pivot Drive Technology, which together project a 4x increase in HDD throughput while maintaining the relative I/O per TB rate customers enjoy today. This reduces the need for customers to increase SSD deployment or rearchitect services as capacity scales.
- WD’s Platform solutions highlighted will include the Ultrastar Data Series JBODs, OpenFlex EBOF, and RapidFlex NVMe-oF controller. These solutions help cloud, neo cloud and HPC companies accelerate adoption by optimizing capacity and performance, reducing costs, and improving time to value without requiring costly infrastructure designs. WD is also showcasing its new Ultrastar Data 3000 series JBODs, delivering the scalable capacity required for AI data growth. Using ArcticFlow multizone cooling and patented IsoVibe vibration isolation technologies, the Ultrastar Data 3000 series optimizes performance and reliability by reducing drive return rates by up to 62% in a platform designed for dependable operation at scale. The 3000 series also offers 12 ports of 24 Gb/s SAS‑4 host connectivity, enabling customers to stay ahead of bandwidth demands as capacity and workload intensities grow.
- WD will also share tiered storage solutions, including architectures built on Ceph and others developed with IBM Storage Scale and XTAO, that align performance and economics to each stage of the AI data lifecycle, increasing GPU efficiency while lowering cost at scale through tiered system-level architectures.
- The globally recognized WD Color portfolio including WD Gold, WD Red, and WD Purple, as well as the rebranded G-DRIVE family of external storage solutions designed for content creators, will also be on display.
Together, these innovations position WD as a key foundational layer in AI infrastructure, enabling the persistence, movement, and scalability of data across environments.
“Computex is a great opportunity to connect with AI leaders and builders from around the world at a pivotal moment for the industry,” said Stefan Mandl, Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at WD. “AI is driving data growth at a scale and pace the industry has never seen before, and the organizations that recognize AI as a data system are the ones that will build AI that scales economically and efficiently over the long term. WD provides the durable, scalable and economically efficient data infrastructure foundation required to support AI systems over the long term.”
Visit WD’s booth #R1308, 4F, Hall 2 at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center.
