AI infrastructure demand has consumed NAND and HDD supply at a scale that has pushed storage prices upward across the board throughout 2025. Against that backdrop, the WD Elements 20TB desktop external hard drive at $599, down from its $814 standard price, works out to roughly $0.03 per gigabyte for 20 terabytes of plug-and-play storage. That’s still pennies per gigabyte in a market where those pennies have been getting more expensive, and it’s considerably cheaper than what cloud storage costs at this scale over any meaningful time horizon.
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$0.03 per GB when AI companies have been driving that number up
The mechanism behind the storage price pressure is straightforward: AI model training and inference require enormous amounts of fast storage, and the companies building data centers are competing for the same NAND flash and HDD platters that consumer drives use. Western Digital and Seagate supply both markets, and when enterprise demand accelerates faster than manufacturing capacity, consumer pricing follows upward. The WD Elements 20TB at $599 reflects that pressure: this drive was cheaper a year ago, and it may be more expensive a year from now depending on how AI infrastructure buildout continues.
