WD expects to produce six exabytes less flash due to power outage

Western Digital can produce six exabytes less flash memory than planned. That is due to a power outage at its joint venture Toshiba Memory Corporation on June 15, the company reports.

Western Digital is working with Toshiba Memory Corporation to restore production as soon as possible, the company said in a statement. The power outage occurred in Japan’s Yokkaichi region on Saturday, June 15. The incident affected the facilities of the joint venture of Toshiba and Western Digital, causing, among other things, the process tools for processing wafers for the production of nand memory for a short period of time.

WD is still investigating the full impact, but the company expects at least a decrease in flash memory production of six exabytes, or six million terabytes. WD expects the impact on the company to be particularly evident in the first quarter of its fiscal year 2020, which is October through December. For example, the company will probably be able to supply fewer SSDs than it wanted during that period.

According to TrendForce, the power outage lasted just 13 minutes. TrendForce’s DRAMeXchange subsidiary, which analyzes memory prices, expects 2d-nand prices to rise as a result of the incident while price reductions for stacked 3d-nand may level off.