Western Digital reaps Chia cryptocurrency rewards with millions of dollars of additional HDD sales

It seems Western Digital (WD) has been reaping the not unsubstantial rewards associated with Chia cryptocurrency farming. While it’s generally known that effective crypto mining involves the use of multiple high-end GPUs, Chia utilizes a proof of space and time method rather than a proof of work method like its fellow cryptocurrencies. Put simply, earning Chia is more about how much storage you can provide and for how long rather than how much processing power your computer system offers.

WD made revenue of US$4.9 billion in its fourth fiscal quarter, up 15% year over year. Unsurprisingly, with HDDs and SSDs being required for Chia farming enterprises, manufacturers like WD have seen an uptick in sales. In fact, the corporation’s CEO, David Goeckeler, was willing to share some information about the Chia effect in a recent Western Digital earnings call. The executive reportedly made these comments, via transcript provided by Seeking Alpha:

I think the first week of it last quarter, probably a couple $100 million of upside there in the quarter due to Chia.

Large-capacity hard disk drives are especially important for Chia farming, and there are some extremely large external WD HDDs available. For instance, the enterprise-aimed G-SPEED Shuttle XL range (Thunderbolt 2 series) offers from 24 TB storage space all the way up to 112 TB, although you would have to be willing to pay out US$7,999.95 for the largest model. But there’s always the affordable WD Elements Desktop HDD lineup from 3 TB to 18 TB, which has a 10 TB model for just US$229.99, to tempt would-be amateur Chia cryptocurrency farmers. The WD (ticker: WDC) stock price rose for the day, up +3.28% by closing time, to finish on 67.07.

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