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The AI frenzy everyone talks about didn’t just make the usual headlines for flashy names — it reawakened the American workhorse industries most people had written off. Data storage companies quietly ripped higher in 2025, proving once again that when private enterprise is unleashed, capital chases value where value is being created.
Hard-drive makers Seagate and Western Digital exploded higher last year, surging by well over 200 and 300 percent respectively, while household AI darlings like Nvidia and Alphabet saw more modest gains in comparison. Those numbers aren’t fluff — they show real money flowing back into core manufacturing and infrastructure that actually powers the AI economy.
The reason is simple and unapologetically practical: AI doesn’t just need chips, it needs immense, cheap storage to hold the mountains of text, images, audio and video these models generate and consume. Analysts estimate massive multi-hundred-billion-dollar spending on storage and data center buildouts as companies race to house the compute that fuels progress.
It wasn’t only traditional hard drives that benefited; flash-memory players — including a Sandisk spinout and Micron — posted eye-popping gains as demand for different tiers of storage exploded. This is the kind of market correction that rewards companies who survived the lean years by staying disciplined and focused on product and capacity.
Conservatives should celebrate this return to American industrial strength: after years of hollowing out, supply chains are being rebuilt, factories matter again, and corporate prudence — not government mandates — is being rewarded. The hard-drive industry contracted to avoid past pain, and that rational decision-making by firms now yields pricing power and profits; it’s proof that enterprise and responsibility work better than top-down fiat.
That said, patriots who love markets should also be skeptical of froth. Industry valuations have stretched, and some analysts warn that forward price-to-earnings multiples for parts of the sector are elevated, even as overlooked workhorse names lead performance tables in the S&P. Smart, conservative investors will cheer American industry but stay disciplined against feverish speculation.
In the end this is a story about American resilience and the reward for building real things that the world needs. Policymakers who want more of this should drop the regulatory deadweight, cut needless corporate taxes, and let energy and infrastructure policies support manufacturing growth — not punish it. Hardworking Americans who build, fix and run our data backbone deserve the chance to win; let them.
