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Western Digital (WDC) said the AI boom has helped boost demand for SSDs, while separately noting that the company’s “soft” version is expected in early October.
Rob Soderberry, executive vice president and general manager of Western Digital’s Flash business unit, was speaking. At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology conference on Tuesday, he answered questions about the company’s breakup, artificial intelligence, and future growth, among other things.
Soderberry said the company’s current pricing guidance reflects overall weakness in the transactional market. Weak end markets are leading to conservatism in transaction channels, and impacting consumer-facing things. However, he noted that the AI boom has helped.
“The AI boom has directly impacted the SSD business, we caught the big wave in March and April of this year, and that wave is still going strong, and there is still a lot of demand for SSDs in particular with the move to higher capacity,” Soderbergh said.
The executive noted that mobile devices performed better than PCs, and mobile vendors were more aggressive in pursuing the AI-enabled device opportunity.
As for how Western Digital uses AI, Soderberry noted that the company has a large program to leverage AI and machine learning within its engineering department.
“For us, we’re probably on a two-year trajectory to invest $100 million in productivity and deploy it elsewhere based on the benefits of AI and machine learning,” Soderberry said.
The CEO also talked about dividing the company’s business. Western Digital plans to split into two publicly listed companies in the second half of this year, with one focused on hard disk drives, or HDDs, and the other on flash memory.
Soderberry said the company will undergo a “soft spin” — which was done internally — in early October. “The separation gives us an opportunity to be more clear about what we’re going to do with flash, as well as focus more on harnessing the energy of the company beyond flash and hard drives,” Soderberry said.