Seagate Know-how’s headquarters in Scotts Valley, California.
Tony Avelar | Bloomberg | Getty Photographs
Knowledge storage agency Seagate is working to develop a 100-terabyte laborious drive by 2030, touting blistering demand from information facilities for the 70-year-old expertise within the synthetic intelligence growth.
BS Teh, Seagate’s chief industrial officer, instructed CNBC that the corporate is aiming to launch such a drive — which might have about 3 times the capability of the agency’s top-of-the-line laborious drives — by 2030. The biggest laborious disk drive Seagate at the moment produces is the 36-terabyte Exos M mannequin, which it launched in January.
“You might be considering, ‘Who would want it?'” Teh mentioned, referring to the thought of a 100-terabyte laborious drive. “Properly, lots.”
“I feel there’s undoubtedly sturdy demand,” he added. “This can be a key enabler for the business to have the ability to ship the storage capability that the market wants, as a result of there isn’t any different expertise that is in a position to produce this capability of storage expertise to fulfill the expansion that the market wants.”
Seagate has been touting itself as extra of an AI participant in recent times amid the rise of foundational fashions like these being developed by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. Within the laptop {hardware} market, the AI growth has largely benefited gamers like Nvidia which make the graphics processing items wanted for coaching and working AI fashions.
Local weather considerations
However the growth in information facilities comes with implications for the surroundings. Knowledge facilities require important quantities of energy to run.
In line with the Worldwide Vitality Company, a single ChatGPT question makes use of up a mean 2.9 watt-hours per request — practically 10 instances the quantity required for a typical Google search — which means if ChatGPT was used within the 9 billion web searches finished every day, nearly 10 terawatt-hours of further electrical energy a yr can be required.
Teh defined that Seagate is working to deal with local weather considerations surrounding AI’s power calls for by rising storage density on its laborious drives and guaranteeing its manufacturing is underpinned by renewable power.
“We deal with what we are able to affect, and what we are able to affect comes all the way down to how we now have a sustainable option to manufacture the product,” Teh mentioned. “We’ve a goal to make it possible for all of our factories are utilizing renewable power to fabricate the product.”
“With the product itself, we design it to have decrease energy per terabyte, or to have greater density of the system itself, such that whenever you really combine that product into your information middle, you require much less area, much less energy, much less every part, since you’re utilizing your fewer drives to satisfy that capability,” he added.
It is price highlighting that Seagate faces competitors from different applied sciences — not least from solid-state drives, which use flash reminiscence chips relatively than magnetic platters to retailer information electronically. Nonetheless, Teh insists laborious disk drive is “a way more sustainable system expertise” than solid-state drives by way of the embodied carbon.
