(Reuters) -Western Digital forecast second-quarter earnings above Wall Street estimates on Thursday, betting on higher demand for its data storage products as cloud providers increase data center capacity.

The company also increased the quarterly cash dividend on its common stock by 25% to $0.125 per share, sending its shares up nearly 10% in extended trading.

Data storage solutions firms, such as Western Digital and Seagate Technology, are benefiting from massive demand for high-capacity hard disk drives.

This surge is fueled by the AI boom and expanding cloud infrastructure, as cloud providers rely on these devices to store the vast amount of data required to train AI models.

“Western Digital continues to execute well in a strong demand environment driven by growth of data storage in

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