It Seems Like the AI Apocalypse Has Come for Hard Drives

PC gaming has been off to a rough start in 2026, with both RAM and graphics cards facing massive stock issues, due to demand from AI datacenters. It looks like hard drives are next.

Both Seagate and Western Digital, two of the biggest hard drive manufacturers, have told investors that stock is completely sold out through 2027, according to a report from German outlet Heise. As a result, hard drives are starting to see increased prices. For instance, a 4TB WD Blue drive costs $99 on Amazon right now, where it cost just $67–$85 just a few months ago, according to Camelcamelcamel.

That’s bad enough, but it looks like SSDs are also being impacted by the sudden increase of demand for hard drives, which is also costing the price of flash storage to go up – and it was already starting to rise in January.

Because both HDD manufacturers are claiming that their 2026 stock has already been sold through, it’s unlikely that the hard drive pricing situation is going to improve any time soon. And with another critical component being impacted by datacenter-driven demand, it’s even more likely that prebuilt gaming PCs and other gaming hardware is going to go up in price over the next year.

Why Hard Drives? Why Now?

For a while now, hard drives have been a budget-friendly way of adding extra storage to your PC, even though they’ve been falling out of fashion as a main storage device. That mostly comes down to speed: Because hard drives have to physically locate data on a moving disk, they’re much slower than SSDs. The appeal, then, was that you could get a ton of space for not much money. But that’s also what makes them super appealing for AI training.

Training LLMs like ChatGPT or Gemini requires a ton of data, so it’s not surprising that AI companies are prioritizing storage capacity over the speed of the storage. And as the hard drive manufacturers reach manufacturing limits, SSDs are going to start filling in the gaps – even if they’re much more expensive to produce at the same capacities.

Unfortunately, SSDs were already starting to feel the pressure from the RAM pricing, as it uses some of the same components. We’re now at a point where I’m not sure if there are any PC components that aren’t going to be impacted by AI in the next year or so.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra