David Tang

Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing, Western Digital

Search every verified David Tang interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a February 2018 CUBEConversation, David Tang, Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Western Digital, discussed the company's commitment to adopting the RISC-V open-source instruction set architecture. Tang stated that Western Digital ships approximately one billion processor cores annually across devices such as USB sticks and hard drives, and that the company plans to migrate all of those cores to RISC-V. He described the move as a way to bring scale to open architecture, allowing Western Digital to modify and optimize instruction sets for specific storage and data-centric applications. Tang said that the open-source nature of RISC-V enables the company to develop specialized processors for applications including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and IoT, which he argued require tailored architectures beyond general-purpose designs. He also noted that the collaborative ecosystem around RISC-V encourages contributions from partners and developers, which he said fosters innovation and enables niche applications. Tang characterized Western Digital's strategic shift as a response to the need for scalable, flexible processing solutions in a rapidly evolving data landscape.