Western Digital fell 17.35% to $267.63 in a $2.5 trillion Nasdaq rout, and Fidelity holds 9.2%

Western Digital▼−2.27% — Western Digital, down 2.27 percent today chief executive Irving Tan told investors on the October 22 call that he has visibility into 2030 and 2031 with his top seven cloud customers ¹. On Thursday the market stopped at the midterm election instead.

The stock closed down 17.35% at $267.63 as the Nasdaq Composite fell 5.5% into correction, erasing about $2.5 trillion, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped more than 12%, its worst day since 2020 ²³. SanDisk lost 22%, Micron▲+4.34% — Micron, up 4.34 percent today 17%, Seagate▼−2.59% — Seagate, down 2.59 percent today 16% ²¹. Wednesday's Dow rally, the best post-election day in 44 years, had already left Western Digital 6.7% lower ⁴.

Sold through 2028, repriced for 2029

The order book did not crack. Fiscal first-quarter revenue↗ was $4.38 billion, up 55%, price per terabyte rose 28%, cloud buyers were 88% of sales, and the December quarter is guided to $5.1 billion, the quarter The Inference parsed on November 3 ⁵. Seagate chief executive Dave Mosley says most of its nearline drives, the high-capacity storage that fills cloud data centers, sit under long-term agreements through calendar 2028 ¹.

Politics cracked instead. Arizona Representative Yassamin Ansari, whose party just won both houses of Congress, wrote that "top of the Democratic agenda on day 1 needs to be a pause on advanced AI development," and an NBC-SSRS exit poll found about 76% of voters oppose new data centers↗ where they live ¹⁴.

The bans were multiplying before anyone voted

Citi▲+1.33% — Citi, up 1.33 percent today Research, in data shared by The Information, counted US data center bans and pauses near zero through mid-2025, about 20 by December, past 300 in June and above 500 by October ⁶. UBS puts about 30% of expected US capacity additions in 2028 at risk from construction pauses, and Goldman Sachs▲+0.85% — Goldman Sachs, up 0.85 percent today estimates 45% of planned US capacity could face restrictions under newly elected governors ⁶⁷.

A position blowout, then Fidelity's mark

Thursday was mostly mechanics. Bloomberg reports margin calls from Taiwan to Hong Kong↗; the Hong Kong fund Aspex lost 16% in October and the AI-focused Value Aligned Research Advisors fell 33% ⁸. "It looks more like a position blowout than a fundamental rethinking of the future," Hong Kong analyst Travis Lundy said ⁸.

Bulls can point to Friday morning's bounce, SanDisk up 10%↗, to Morgan Stanley's▲+0.63% — Morgan Stanley, up 0.63 percent today forecast of more than $1 trillion in AI infrastructure spending next year, and to Yardeni Research's buying-opportunity call ⁹⁷. But at 11.5 times forward earnings against its own five-year median of 9.75, the crash did not make the stock cheap against its own history, and the 28% price-per-terabyte gain has to survive if a pause becomes law ⁵.

Fidelity's FMR filed a routine passive-ownership form↗ on the day of the crash: 9.2% of Western Digital, 31.6 million shares, sole voting power over 28.9 million, a September 30 snapshot ¹⁰. What it did on Thursday stays private until February's filing. The front of the book is under contract; the back is under politics.