Seagate Warns of 'Carbon Crisis' Due to Rise of AI
The exhibition Computex 2025 Seagate presented its developments in the field of corporate data storage and expressed concern about the sharp increase in infrastructure load due to artificial intelligence. According to Digitimes, Seagate said at the conference that High demand from AI could lead to a new 'carbon crisis' in the data storage industry, if the industry does not adapt to new requirements.
According to Seagate's calculations, The world's hard drive production is only capable of producing 1-2 zettabytes per year (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes), while the volumes of data generated already significantly exceed these figures. The company conducted a survey among 1000 IT specialists, and 72% said they are already using AI or planning to implement it, 90% of them believe that AI performance directly depends on the efficiency of data storage.
In response to industry challenges, Seagate Focuses on Improving Hard Drives, arguing that HDDs have a smaller carbon footprint than SSDs, especially in data center conditions. The company's stand featured NVMe hard drive prototype, directly connected to the NVIDIA graphics card via DPU modules (Data Processing Units). This demonstrates a possible transition to a new architecture, where HDD can interact with GPU directly, bypassing classic server nodes.
This approach may become key in the future, especially given the need reducing energy consumption and compliance with new environmental standards. Seagate also reminded that by 2030 it plans to release hard drives up to 100 TB, and current models will triple their capacity in the next 5 years.
Given the projected growth of AI, redistribution of the load between SSD and HDD, as well as the transition to GPU-oriented storage architectures may become the main direction of development in the field of data centers.
