Seagate to triple hard drive capacity by 2030 to meet AI demand

Data storage firm Seagate is working to develop a 100-terabyte hard drive by 2030, touting blistering demand from data centers for the 70-year-old technology in the artificial intelligence boom.

BS Teh, Seagate’s chief commercial officer, told CNBC that the company is aiming to launch such a drive — which would have about three times the capacity of the firm’s top-of-the-line hard drives — by 2030. The largest hard disk drive Seagate currently produces is the 36-terabyte Exos M model, which it launched in January.

“You may be thinking, ‘Who would need it?'” Teh said, referring to the idea of a 100-terabyte hard drive. “Well, plenty.”

“I think there’s definitely strong demand,” he added. “This is a key enabler for the industry to be able to deliver the storage capacity that the market needs, because there’s no other technology that’s able to produce this capacity of storage technology to meet the growth that the market needs.”

Seagate has been touting itself as more of an AI player in recent years amid the rise of foundational models like those being developed by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. In the computer hardware market, the AI boom has largely benefited players like Nvidia which make the graphics processing units needed for training and running AI models.

But the boom in data centers comes with implications for the environment. Data centers require significant amounts of power to run.

According to the International Energy Agency, a single ChatGPT query uses up an average 2.9 watt-hours per request — nearly 10 times the amount required for a typical Google search — meaning if ChatGPT was used in the 9 billion internet searches done each day, almost 10 terawatt-hours of additional electricity a year would be required.

Teh explained that Seagate is working to address climate concerns surrounding AI’s energy demands by increasing storage density on its hard drives and ensuring its manufacturing is underpinned by renewable energy.

“We focus on what we can influence, and what we can influence comes down to how we have a sustainable way to manufacture the product,” Teh said. “We have a target to make sure that all of our factories are using renewable energy to manufacture the product.”

“With the product itself, we design it to have lower power per terabyte, or to have higher density of the device itself, such that when you actually integrate that product into your data center, you require less space, less power, less everything, because you’re using your fewer drives to fulfill that capacity,” he added.

It’s worth highlighting that Seagate faces competition from other technologies — not least from solid-state drives, which use flash memory chips rather than magnetic platters to store data electronically. However, Teh insists hard disk drive is “a much more sustainable device technology” than solid-state drives in terms of the embodied carbon.