Seagate Triples Drive Capacity as it Braces for AI Data Center Boom

US data storage company Seagate is developing a 100-terabyte hard drive, CNBC reported. The largest drive that Seagate manufactures is the 36TB Exos M model that launched at the beginning of this year. Seagate’s move to triple drive capacity is inspired by growing demand from data centers.

A Key Enabler

Founded 70 years ago, the tech firm sees data storage capacity as a key enabler in the emerging AI industry. The company plans to launch the Seagate 100TB drive by the year 2030. The company is seeking to leverage AI-driven storage demand as more businesses ride the AI boom.

“You may be thinking, Who would need it? Well, plenty. I think there’s definitely strong demand. 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 Chief Commercial Officer BS Teh said.

In recent years, Seagate has been positioning itself as an AI player and more as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft models gain prominence. Companies that manufacture chips that are required to run and train AI models have reaped big in the computer hardware market. Such companies include Nvidia and AMD.

Demand for AI chips has remained high even as the US moves to control their export to countries like China. Last month, the US Department of Commerce announced that Nvidia must get licenses to export H20 GPUs. The new controls also apply to additional AMD chips.

The Data Center Boom

AI models need huge volumes of data to train and generate highly advanced outputs. Experts expect the global data center storage needs to double by the end of this year. According to Data Dynamics, the rapid growth of generative AI is driving data storage and generation requirements exponentially. The result is a data explosion that the data storage industry must address.

This is where Seagate’s hard drive capacity will be needed most. At the beginning of this year, Microsoft announced plans to spend $80 billion on data centers this year. Other US big techs also plan to spend huge amounts on data centers this year.

In January this year, President Donald Trump unveiled a $500 billion investment towards establishment of data centers in the US. The investment from OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle will be channeled through the Stargate joint venture. The data center investment is designed to enable the US to stay ahead of rival countries like China in the global AI race.

Environmental Concerns

As the world deals with the AI boom, environmentalists are raising concerns over the amount of power required to run data centers. Data from the International Energy Agency shows that one ChatGPT query consumes about 2.9 watt-hours. This is about 10 times that amount of power needed to process a single Google search.

Seagate says it is addressing concerns around the high AI energy demands by enhancing storage density in its hard drives. The data storage firm also says production of Seagate’s next-gen storage drives will be embedded 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. 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,” Teh added.

Seagate’s hard drive innovation faces stiff competition from technologies such as solid-state drives that utilize flash memory chips as opposed to magnetic platters. However, the data storage company says its hard disk drive technology is more sustainable. Seagate stocks surged 40% over the last one month.