Western Digital to Split in Two After Kioxia Bid Fails (2)

Western Digital Corp. will split into two separate, publicly traded companies after talks to merge with Kioxia Holdings Corp. fell apart.

The storage maker will spin off its flash business, which focuses on memory for computers, devices and portable drives, it said in a statement Monday alongside fiscal first-quarter earnings. The company’s remaining HDD business will focus on selling high-capacity memory to cloud data centers.

Shares rose as much as 13% on the news, their most since May 2022.

Splitting the two divisions could be a valuable long-term strategy for Western Digital, which had tried for years to combine with ...