Seagate Technology’s headquarters in Scotts Valley, California.
Tony Avelar | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Data garage company Seagate is operating to expand a 100-terabyte laborious pressure by means of 2030, touting blistering call for from knowledge facilities for the 70-year-old generation within the synthetic intelligence growth.
BS Teh, Seagate’s leader business officer, advised CNBC that the corporate is aiming to release one of these pressure — which might have about thrice the capability of the company’s among the best laborious drives — by means of 2030. The biggest laborious disk pressure Seagate these days produces is the 36-terabyte Exos M style, which it introduced in January.
“You may be thinking, ‘Who would need it?'” Teh mentioned, relating to the theory of a 100-terabyte laborious pressure. “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 extra of an AI participant lately amid the upward push of foundational fashions like the ones being advanced by means of OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. In the pc {hardware} marketplace, the AI growth has in large part benefited avid gamers like Nvidia which make the graphics processing devices wanted for coaching and operating AI fashions.
Climate considerations
But the growth in knowledge facilities comes with implications for the surroundings. Data facilities require important quantities of energy to run.
According to the International Energy Agency, a unmarried ChatGPT question makes use of up a median 2.9 watt-hours according to request — just about 10 instances the quantity required for a regular Google seek — that means if ChatGPT was once used within the 9 billion web searches completed on a daily basis, nearly 10 terawatt-hours of extra electrical energy a yr can be required.
Teh defined that Seagate is operating to handle local weather considerations surrounding AI’s power calls for by means of expanding garage density on its laborious drives and making sure its production is underpinned by means of renewable power.
“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 mentioned. “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 price highlighting that Seagate faces festival from different applied sciences — no longer least from solid-state drives, which use flash reminiscence chips moderately than magnetic platters to retailer knowledge electronically. However, Teh insists laborious disk pressure is “a much more sustainable device technology” than solid-state drives in relation to the embodied carbon.