Irving Tan
Chief Executive Officer
2025 – Present
1 year (current)
Key Decisions & Impact
Tan, who holds engineering and MBA degrees from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, spent years at Cisco including as Chairperson for Asia Pacific, Japan, and China and as Executive Vice President and global chief of operations and sales, before joining Western Digital as Executive Vice President for Global Operations. He became CEO in February 2025, the same month Western Digital completed the SanDisk spin-off.
Legacy
Leads the post-SanDisk Western Digital through cloud HDD demand, capital returns, and a focused, single-product-line data-storage strategy for the first time in the company's history since the 2016 SanDisk merger. His operations-and-sales background from Cisco, rather than deep semiconductor or storage-engineering expertise, suggests the board prioritized commercial execution and customer relationships -- particularly with the hyperscale cloud providers that now dominate Western Digital's enterprise HDD demand -- over pure technical leadership for this phase of the company's history. He took over at a moment when Western Digital was simplifying its structure after years of considering a full separation of its HDD and flash businesses, and his mandate has centered on sharpening capital discipline and operational execution across the remaining HDD-focused company following the 2024 Sandisk spin-off. His prior role as Executive Vice President and Global Chief of Operations at Cisco, along with earlier stints leading Cisco's Asia-Pacific, Japan, and China region and at A.T. Kearney and Hewlett-Packard, gave him deep experience managing the kind of complex, high-volume global operations and component-sourcing relationships that also define hard-drive manufacturing.