Industry insiders cited by TrendForce say wait times for HDDs now stretch to almost a year. This has pushed Western Digital to join other companies in raising storage prices across its whole HDD range. Western Digital becomes the third major storage maker to change its prices. SanDisk upped its NAND prices by 10%, while Micron froze its prices for a week. The company points to sky-high demand for all its HDD sizes as the reason for these gradual price hikes. It also cites ongoing work on cutting-edge technology. Western Digital plans to ship more products by sea, which will add 6-10 weeks to current shipping times. The company asks customers to keep these longer delivery times in mind when they place orders.

With cloud giants like Google and Oracle increasing efforts to enhance their infrastructure, the impact on the demand for high-capacity storage is adding tension to the storage market, causing a significant mismatch between supply and demand . To tackle the long wait times for HDDs, memory makers are working hard to come up with Nearline SSD options. They aim to shrink the price difference between SSDs and HDDs from 4 to 5 times to about 3 times making SSDs more tempting for customers who don't want to wait for HDDs. The storage industry is adjusting its prices because of the huge demand for infrastructure as AI services grow fast and suppliers are having a tough time ramping up production to keep up with the sky-high demand for all types of storage.