Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing, bonus story of the week.

Today on Forbes, these lesser-known AI stocks are reaching record highs.

While everyone couldn't stop talking about flashy AI stocks like Nvidia and Alphabet in 2025,

lesser-known data storage stocks saw massive gains.

Stocks of hard-drive manufacturers, Seagate, and Western Digital, skyrocketed more than

220% and 300% respectively in the last year.

That's staggering growth, compared to Alphabet's 65% gains and NVIDIA's 35%.

Manufacturers of flash memory products in the U.S., including Sandisk, which was spun out

of Western Digital last February, and Micron Technology, are up around 850% and 230% year-over-year,

respectively.

That's due to an acceleration and demand for data storage needed for training and running

AI models, not only for AI-generated text, but also increasingly for photo, audio, and video.

These models create a ton of data that needs to be stored, too, as people spin up everything

from silly videos and characters

to original songs.

Carl Ackerman, who leads semiconductor and IT hardware research at BNP Peribus, said, quote,

the more text, videos, and pictures we generate, ideally we want to store more of them,

and the storage content of those videos and pictures

are a heck of a lot more than text.

As tech companies race to accelerate the development of AI, they've committed billions of

dollars to building out data centers where they store and process all that data.

McKinsey estimates that $800 billion will be spent on storage alone in data centers in the

...