Western Digital Corp. shares were trading at $374.11 on April 20, capping a run that has sent the wdc stock up roughly 190% in 2025. The company now carries a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 35.36 and a forward P/E of 29.50, numbers that reflect how aggressively investors have re-rated the hard drive maker after its February 2025 separation from SanDisk Corp.
The split left SanDisk focused exclusively on high-speed NAND flash, while Western Digital has been cast as a pure-play leader in mass-capacity, low-cost hard disk drives. That position has become more valuable as AI data lakes swell, and the company is being described as the essential vault for the data those systems need to store and retrieve.
Western Digital’s numbers help explain why the market has moved so hard. The company commands a 48% share of the Nearline exabyte market, and its UltraSMR technology is already enabling 32TB drives by overlapping data tracks. It is also rolling out HAMR technology to target 40TB-plus capacities, while vertical integration gives it control over the heads and media that go into its drives. Lead times for high-capacity HDDs were said to be stretching to 12 months, a sign that demand is running ahead of supply.
That demand story is not unique to Western Digital. Seagate Technology Holdings plc is also benefiting from the same AI-driven storage buildout, but Western Digital’s post-split structure has made the company’s hard drive business easier for investors to value on its own. The market has noticed. At the same time, the stock still sat outside the list of the 40 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds.
Even so, hedge fund interest held up. A database showed 79 hedge fund portfolios held WDC at the end of the fourth quarter, down from 84 in the previous quarter. That pullback suggests some large investors were trimming exposure even as the broader market pushed the shares sharply higher. For now, Western Digital is being treated less like a legacy hardware name and more like one of the few companies able to supply the storage backbone for the next wave of AI infrastructure.
