Seagate Expertise’s headquarters in Scotts Valley, California.
Tony Avelar | Bloomberg | Getty Pictures
Information storage agency Seagate is working to develop a 100-terabyte onerous drive by 2030, touting blistering demand from information facilities for the 70-year-old expertise within the synthetic intelligence increase.
BS Teh, Seagate’s chief business officer, informed 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 onerous drives — by 2030. The biggest onerous disk drive Seagate at present produces is the 36-terabyte Exos M mannequin, which it launched in January.
“You could be considering, ‘Who would wish it?'” Teh mentioned, referring to the thought of a 100-terabyte onerous drive. “Nicely, a lot.”
“I feel there’s undoubtedly robust demand,” he added. “It is a key enabler for the trade to have the ability to ship the storage capability that the market wants, as a result of there is no different expertise that is capable of produce this capability of storage expertise to satisfy 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 increase has largely benefited gamers like Nvidia which make the graphics processing models wanted for coaching and operating AI fashions.
Local weather issues
However the increase in information facilities comes with implications for the setting. Information facilities require vital quantities of energy to run.
Based on the Worldwide Power Company, a single ChatGPT question makes use of up a median 2.9 watt-hours per request — almost 10 instances the quantity required for a typical Google search — that means if ChatGPT was used within the 9 billion web searches accomplished every day, virtually 10 terawatt-hours of further electrical energy a 12 months can be required.
Teh defined that Seagate is working to deal with local weather issues surrounding AI’s vitality calls for by rising storage density on its onerous drives and guaranteeing its manufacturing is underpinned by renewable vitality.
“We deal with what we are able to affect, and what we are able to affect comes all the way down to how we have now a sustainable technique to manufacture the product,” Teh mentioned. “We’ve got a goal to ensure that all of our factories are utilizing renewable vitality to fabricate the product.”
“With the product itself, we design it to have decrease energy per terabyte, or to have increased density of the machine itself, such that whenever you truly combine that product into your information middle, you require much less house, much less energy, much less every little thing, since you’re utilizing your fewer drives to satisfy that capability,” he added.
It is value highlighting that Seagate faces competitors from different applied sciences — not least from solid-state drives, which use flash reminiscence chips fairly than magnetic platters to retailer information electronically. Nonetheless, Teh insists onerous disk drive is “a way more sustainable machine expertise” than solid-state drives by way of the embodied carbon.