As India’s data economy accelerates across AI, cloud, surveillance, and smart infrastructure, enterprises are seeking scalable, efficient, and future-ready storage solutions. WD is addressing this demand with its high-capacity, enterprise-grade innovations and a strong partner-led approach. In this conversation, Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal, speaks with Owais Mohammed, Director Sales, MEA & India, WD (Formerly Western Digital), to understand how the company is enabling data growth, strengthening its ecosystem, and building the storage foundation for the AI-driven future.
Rajeev: India’s data demand is growing rapidly across enterprise IT, cloud, AI, surveillance, and smart infrastructure. How is WD adapting its strategy to support this expansion?
Owais: India’s data growth mirrors global trends, accelerated by Digital India initiatives to hyperscale cloud expansion and smart city deployments. In addition, AI adoption and explosive information growth are fundamentally reshaping storage demands. At WD, we continue to align our strategy to meet customer needs as they manage through this unprecedented growth of data. We are a data-centre-led company, with nearly 90% of our revenue tied to data centre and AI workloads — a mix that anchors us to secular growth rather than the ebbs and flows of the broader economic cycle. This reflects where the world’s data gravity now sits and underlines AI’s data-hungry and retentive nature.
Critically, around 80% of hyperscale storage capacity still resides on HDDs, even in AI-first environments. At exabyte scale, cost efficiency, density, durability, and power optimisation matter, which cements HDDs importance as the backbone of AI infrastructure.
Because hyperscalers need this fast, predictable, efficient capacity expansion in today’s zettabyte age, we’re seeing unprecedented momentum around higher-capacity drives. Last quarter alone, we shipped 3.5 million units of our latest generation ePMR products.
To meet AI’s capacity and performance demands, we have introduced the world’s first 40TB ePMR HDD (now in qualification) and accelerated HAMR technology qualification with two major customers. We have also reaffirmed our roadmap to 100TB HAMR HDDs by 2029, enabled by our proprietary laser innovation.
As the world enters an AI-led data era, WD is architecting the storage foundation that enables it.
Rajeev: WD has been a leader in HDD innovation and enterprise-grade storage. How are your solutions evolving to meet the needs of mission-critical workloads and next-generation applications in India?
Owais: At WD, we’ve fundamentally reimagined the hard drive to meet the demands of mission-critical workloads and next-generation applications. AI is reshaping how data is created, stored, and used, and our strategy reflects this reality. We are focused on giving customers what matters most: high capacity with unmatched economics at scale, breakthrough performance, power efficiency, ease of adoption; and all of these without disruption to their business.
On capacity, our dual-path innovation in ePMR and HAMR technologies provides a clear, trusted roadmap to 100TB+ drives. This approach gives cloud and enterprise customers flexibility to scale on their own timelines, with predictable planning and seamless transitions.
In India's context, this matters acutely. As banks modernize core systems, telecoms deploy 5G infrastructure, and manufacturers implement Industry 4.0, predictable capacity scaling without forklift upgrades becomes a competitive advantage
On performance, we’ve introduced High Bandwidth and Dual Pivot technologies that reset HDD capabilities. These innovations will allow workloads once considered flash-only to run efficiently on HDDs, balancing speed and economics while maintaining trusted reliability.
We’re also addressing the sustainability aspect. Our power-optimized HDDs are designed for the growing cold data tier in AI and cloud environments that are reducing energy consumption while keeping valuable data accessible in seconds. This power-optimized HDD will bridge the gap between warm and cold storage, making large-scale AI storage more economical and environmentally responsible.
Finally, we are expanding our platforms business with intelligent APIs to simplify deployment and reduce qualification risks. This intelligent software layer will accelerate storage innovation adoption across WD’s UltraSMR, ePMR and HAMR HDD. This helps ensure that even mid-scale enterprises can achieve hyperscale economics and efficiency, accelerating their time-to-value.
In short, WD is building the storage foundation for AI-driven future, combining innovation in capacity, performance, efficiency, and platforms to help customers scale confidently and sustainably.
Rajeev: The Indian channel and distribution ecosystem is key to WD’s growth. Can you elaborate on the initiatives and investments you are making to strengthen these partnerships?
Owais: At WD, we recognize the critical role our channel partners, distributors, and system integrators play in scaling storage adoption across India’s rapidly expanding digital ecosystem. From smart video surveillance and enterprise IT to emerging AI-driven deployments, our engagement strategy is built on three pillars: collaboration, education, and enablement. This helps ensure that partners are well-prepared to meet evolving customer expectations across industries and ecosystems.
Focused training programs on products and technologies form the foundation of this approach. These sessions are designed to enhance technical understanding and help partners deploy our solutions with confidence in a variety of public cloud, private and hybrid IT environments.
Our in-store branding campaigns across 80+ cities and 2,500+ sites in India helps strengthen last-mile visibility and help drive customer awareness in high-growth regional markets, supporting partner-led demand generation. The WD WhatsApp Connect Program serves as a powerful platform that keeps over 5,000 partners informed, engaged, and rewarded. By joining, partners gain exclusive access to essential product insights, promotional updates, and interactive engagement opportunities. It also serves as a direct channel for updates on the WD Purple Partner Program, which is a specialized initiative focused on smart video solutions designed exclusively for prestige partners, giving them differentiated tools, training, and visibility in the surveillance ecosystem.
Alongside this, the Enterprise Club Program, which is created exclusively for top customers in the enterprise segment. It provides strategic engagement, early access to innovations, and tailored support to help them scale mission-critical workloads with confidence.
We also place strong emphasis on strengthening long-term distributor and partner relationships through proactive engagement, technical workshops, and incentive-driven initiatives tailored to regional markets. Simplified engagement processes, and closer collaboration with distributors, enable partners to plan business growth with greater confidence.
By combining digital learning platforms with sustained on-ground presence, we help ensure that partners even in remote regions are fully equipped to deploy solutions efficiently and reliably. This partner-first approach allows us to extend WD’s storage innovation deeper into India while enabling partners to participate meaningfully in the country’s expanding data and AI economy.
Rajeev: How is WD enabling partners to build profitable and scalable storage businesses across traditional and emerging use cases?
Owais: India presents a massive opportunity for the storage industry, and we work closely with our partner ecosystem to help them address the growing needs of data-driven workloads across enterprises, and AI environments. As data continues to grow, partners play a critical role in delivering storage solutions that are reliable, high-capacity, and optimized for specific use cases.
We offer a wide range of high-capacity HDDs solutions designed to meet the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency requirements across these deployments. By combining strong training initiatives, engagement platforms, and visibility campaigns with innovations in capacity, performance, and efficiency, we help ensure our partners can scale confidently, deliver differentiated solutions, and build profitable businesses in India’s rapidly evolving data economy.
Rajeev: Looking ahead, what role does WD see itself playing in shaping India’s data economy, and what innovations should partners and enterprises expect?
Owais: India’s data economy is entering a pivotal phase as AI adoption and digital transformation accelerate. These current trends are driving a significant shift in how India’s IT infrastructure must be planned and evolved to support capacity, resiliency and power-efficiency with the best economics at scale.
WD is positioned to play a foundational role. We are here to assist our partners to help them plan and build the right storage infrastructures that are profitable and future ready. Our high capacity nearline HDD roadmap, power-optimised designs, and performance-enhancing technologies give operators predictable, efficient scale for data heavy environments. With engineering strength in Bengaluru advancing firmware intelligence and storage architectures, we are enabling data centres to grow faster and more sustainably.
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