Trump accounts’ Palantir sale hides a bigger AI shift

President Donald Trump’s investment accounts just put a familiar artificial intelligence trade next to a less obvious one.

That doesn’t mean Trump himself did the trading. According to the source, external parties handled the accounts, and outside managers made the buying and selling choices.

Still, the disclosure gives investors something important to consider.

During the first quarter, Trump’s investment accounts sold between $854,000 and $4.6 million in Palantir Technologies (PLTR), according to a recent public disclosure from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The same accounts bought between $45,000 and $150,000 in Western Digital (WDC), a stock that has soared since early 2023.

That looks like a straight swap between 2 AI winners on the face of it.

It’s more intriguing than that.

Palantir offers investors one of the purest software stories in AI. Instead, Western Digital gives them the data storage layer that AI needs after the models have run, after the prompts have arrived and after the output has been made.

That makes the Western Digital transaction worth watching, even though the dollar amount was tiny.

The real investor question is not whether Palantir has lost its AI attraction.

The question is whether Wall Street is beginning to pay more attention to the quieter infrastructure businesses that hold the data generated by the AI economy.

“The demand drivers are clear: Virtually every AI workload, from training, inference, agentic AI to physical AI, creates data that is stored persistently and cost-efficiently on HDDs,” Western Digital CEO Irving Tan said.

Palantir remains one of AI’s clearest software winners

Palantir has given investors plenty of reasons to stay interested.

The company provides data-integration and analytics software for government and commercial customers. The AI Platform enables customers to connect corporate data to massive language models, automate workflows, and apply AI while keeping sensitive information under control.

That last point is important.

Companies desire the productivity improvements that AI offers, but they would rather not give private data to outside model suppliers. Palantir’s argument is that it helps businesses apply AI to safeguard operational systems.

The company’s ontology-based software bolsters that case. Palantir links digital data to real-world objects, activities, and decisions rather than displaying clients' dashboards or spreadsheets.

That is the reason why the bulls view the firm as more than just another enterprise software vendor.

Related: 5-star analyst gives beaten-down Palantir a surprise verdict

Palantir’s recent numbers back up that case.

The company said revenue in the first quarter was $1.63 billion, up 85% from the year-ago period. Income in the U.S. grew 104%, with U.S. commercial income up 133% and U.S. government revenue up 84%. Palantir also boosted its full-year 2026 revenue outlook to a range of $7.65 billion to $7.66 billion.

Western Digital gives investors a different AI angle

Western Digital is not like Palantir.

It doesn’t market AI software. It doesn't sell itself as a model corporation. It’s not competing with Anthropic, OpenAI or other AI laboratories.

Western Digital doesn’t build the AI itself, but the storage infrastructure firms need to store the data AI creates.

AI doesn’t just need computer power, and hence that business has grown more significant. It also generates and consumes massive volumes of data. Training data, inference outputs, logs, backups, customer records, and model-related information all need to live somewhere.

After the flash division was separated into SanDisk in February 2025, the company’s current business focused on hard disk drives. The business noted that, after the separation, Sandisk’s results are no longer consolidated into Western Digital’s financial results.

That stronger concentration has made Western Digital a clearer play on data center storage.

The company said fiscal third-quarter revenue was $3.34 billion, up 45% from a year ago. Western Digital also reported GAAP gross margin of 50.2 percent, adjusted gross margin of 50.5 percent, GAAP diluted earnings of $8.20 a share and adjusted earnings of $2.72 a share.

Those metrics illustrate how swiftly the storage story has shifted.

Western Digital also delivered $1.12 billion of operating cash flow and $978 million of free cash flow for the quarter. The business projected fourth-quarter fiscal revenue of $3.65 billion, plus or minus $100 million and adjusted earnings of $3.25 a share, plus or minus 15 cents.

More AI:

• The new Chinese AI model rattling U.S. tech investors
• Anthropic restores access to Mythos 5 for select organizations
• SoftBank CEO offers stinging critique of Musk’s AI bet

That gives investors another type of AI play.

Nvidia (NVDA) powers the compute layer. Palantir helps customers operationalize AI. Western Digital stores the growing amount of data those systems create.

That may sound less fascinating than software or semiconductors.

However, in AI infrastructure, less exciting options can still be very profitable.

Michael M&period Santiago &sol Getty Images

Western Digital’s AI story depends on durable storage demand

Western Digital’s bull case depends on a simple idea: AI data does not disappear after a model produces it.

Companies need to store outputs, logs, backups, training data and client information. They have to execute it at scale, and they have to do it at a cost that makes sense.

This supplies a major part to hard disk drives.

While solid-state drives are speedier, hard disk drives are still attractive for large data sets that customers want to store cost-effectively. Western Digital says that AI workloads generate exactly that sort of persistent storage need.

Reuters reported that Western Digital raised its fiscal fourth-quarter revenue view over expectations as demand for high-capacity data storage from artificial intelligence firms continues to rise. The company’s fiscal third-quarter revenue also topped Wall Street projections, according to the report.

That’s the portion of the AI explosion investors can miss.

AI expenditure isn’t just on chips. That includes networking, power, cooling, memory and storage. The industry is shifting from training big models to running them forever for inference so the amount of data created can continue to grow.

Western Digital has doubled down on that statement.

The company describes itself as a provider of storage infrastructure for the “AI-driven data economy” and says it works with hyperscalers, cloud service providers, and enterprises.

Western Digital stock key takeaways

• Trump’s investment accounts sold between $854,000 and $4.6 million in Palantir Technologies, according to The Motley Fool’s review of the disclosure.
• The accounts bought between $45,000 and $150,000 worth of Western Digital.
• The accounts are managed by third-party institutions, so the trades do not mean Trump personally selected the stocks.
• Palantir remains a major AI software winner, with first-quarter revenue up 85%.
• Western Digital gives investors exposure to the storage layer of AI infrastructure.
• Western Digital’s fiscal third-quarter revenue rose 45% to $3.34 billion.
• The bigger investor question is whether AI storage demand can continue to expand as data-center buildouts continue.

The risks are evident.

Western Digital is still in a hardware game that might be cyclical. Customers might postpone orders. Supply catches up, and pricing could soften. If the hyperscalers believe they have built out sufficient capacity for now, spending on AI infrastructure could decelerate.

The stock has already changed sharply, too.

Market data show the stock is trading around $577.46, with a market value of close to $199 billion at the time of this writing.

That means investors can't assume Western Digital is a hidden bargain just because it receives less media attention than Nvidia or Palantir.

This stock has already priced in a lot of AI confidence.

Trump accounts’ trade highlights a broader AI shift

The most significant thing in the disclosure is something other than the identity of the account holder.

It's the direction for AI trading.

Palantir is still one of the most potent software stories in the market. Its expansion indicates that firms and government agencies are looking for AI solutions that plug into real operations. But the stock also illustrates the difficulty of paying a premium for a well-known winner.

Western Digital tells a different story

It is deeper in the infrastructure stack, where investors have begun to hunt for companies that benefit from the physical demands of AI. Data centers need chips, but they also need somewhere to store the data that AI systems create.

That’s why the Western Digital buy is more of a clue than a portfolio event.

It indicates a more significant movement away from the prominent AI names and towards the companies that power the AI economy behind the scenes.

That transformation is a new challenge for investors.

The top AI stocks may not be the ones with the loudest stories. They might be the companies that fix the least glamorous bottlenecks.

Western Digital has to prove demand for AI storage stays strong enough to justify the stock's big rally.

Palantir has to prove it can keep growing into its rich valuation.

The disclosure pulls the two questions into one location.

AI investors have already run with the software story. Now, Wall Street is more interested in where all that AI data goes.

Related: Palantir’s AI valuation problem may finally be easing