By Alicia Park
Publication Date: 2026-01-07 15:41:00
While everyone couldn’t stop talking about flashy AI stocks like Nvidia and Alphabet in 2025, lesser-known data storage stocks saw massive gains.
Shares of hard drive makers Seagate and Western Digital rose more than 220% and 300%, respectively, last year – staggering growth compared to Alphabet’s 65% and Nvidia’s 30%. Manufacturers of flash memory products in the U.S., including Sandisk, which was spun off from Western Digital in February, and Micron Technology, are up about 850% and 230%, respectively, year over year. This is due to the increasing demand for data storage needed to train and run AI models, not just AI-generated text, but increasingly photos, audio and video. These models generate a lot of data that also needs to be stored as people make everything from silly videos and characters to original songs.
“The more text, videos and images we generate, the more of them we ideally want to store, and storage…
