The global storage shortage is in full swing, and it’s about to get even worse. It’s well established that the meteoric rise of AI has led to a crippling shortage of DRAM and NAND chips worldwide, and hard drives are equally affected. Now, supply chain sources from Taiwan report that hard drive shortages worsened over the past quarter, and prices are expected to rise further as a result.
According to a DigiTimes report, hard drive supply shortage worsened in Q2 2026, with the trade prices rising 10% quarter-over-quarter. This increase is reported to be significantly higher than in previous years and can be attributed directly to AI data centers sprawling across the globe.
The report goes on to say that consumer-level 1TB and 2TB HDDs remain difficult to obtain, while high-capacity nearline drives are seeing record demand due to their use by hyperscale cloud providers.
The hard drive shortage boils down to simple economics. AI data centers need to store absolutely gigantic amounts of data, images, videos, and other resources to run their cloud models. This amount of data requires many storage drives, and hard drives are better suited than SSDs for this purpose. For one, they are cheaper per gigabyte, and secondly, they don’t have the finite number of write cycles that SSDs usually have.
The result of this demand has been brutal. Western Digital and Seagate have already confirmed that their entire 2026 hard drive capacity is essentially sold out to AI data centers. As a result, prices have surged nearly 50% over the past 6 months or so.
This trickles down to consumer drives as well. A 4TB WD Blue HDD used to cost around $70-80, but now it’s over $140. This problem is compounded when you consider higher-capacity drives that are ideal for server use.
We are essentially stuck in a vicious cycle regarding these storage shortages. Three companies control nearly all HDD production globally: Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba. With their production runs sold out, data centers are scrambling to switch to QLC NAND-based SSDs, since they are the cheapest and offer the largest capacities. However, that feeds into the whole NAND shortage we mentioned earlier.
As a result, the hard drive shortage is getting worse, with no realistic end in sight. We can expect things to improve sometime in 2027, according to industry analysts, but AI demand might increase by that time to match the new production capacity.
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[PC Hardware Specialist]
Usman Saleem brings 8+ years of comprehensive PC hardware expertise to the table. His journey in the tech world has involved in-depth tech analysis and insightful PC hardware reviews, perfecting over 6+ years of dedicated work. Usman’s commitment to staying authentic and relevant in the field is underscored by many professional certifications, including a recent one in Google IT Support Specialization.
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