- The expansion of the AI pushes the request for ultra-high storage at unprecedented levels
- External hard drive shipments can take six to ten additional weeks
- Western Digital increases all prices of the hard drive, quoting “unprecedented demand” through its wallet
The rapid growth of IA inference services exerts extraordinary pressure on the storage market, especially for hard drives of ultra-high capacity, has warned new research.
Hyperscale cloud service providers such as Google and Oracle aggressively widen AI infrastructure and focus on high -performance inference applications.
A recent Tendency The survey has now claimed that the volumes of massive data generated by the AI contract the overall infrastructure for the storage of the data center.
AI Data volumes The overall storage infrastructure
This creates an increase in the demand for storage solutions that can manage massive data sets, placing the largest hard drives under a strong constraint.
The close hard drives, traditionally the backbone of large -scale data storage, are now faced with serious supply shortages.
This change pushes high performance SSDs but at a higher cost under the spotlight, with high -capacity QLC SSD shipments providing to see rapid growth in 2026.
Tendency Said that the limited growth in production among hard drives manufacturers has left them unable to manage the rapid and fueled AI peak in storage needs.
Consequently, delivery times for almost line hard drives have increased from a few weeks to more than 52 weeks, further expanding storage gaps for cloud service providers.
Currently, hard drives of 30 TB like the Seagate Exos Mozaic + remain easily available, but for models of 32 TB and more, users will have to wait more than a year.
There are also problems of shipping and logistics aggravating food constraints, which directs Western Digital to warn that external hard drive shipments can take much more time than usual.
The company plans to increase the use of ocean freight, potentially adding six to ten weeks in transit times.
To solve these problems, North American CSPs had already planned to increase the adoption of SSDs for the workloads of warm data.
In addition, the severity of the current hard drive deficit has prompted some suppliers to consider the deployment of SSDs even for cold data.
But the SSDs are more expensive and have smaller capacities, even if they offer faster reading / writing speeds and use approximately 30% less power than close hard drives.
It will not be financially prudent to use an SSD for cold data, which is rarely accessible but archived in the long term.
Tendency Recommends that CSPs which plan to use SSD QLCs for cold data must update data systems, check the compatibility of software and carefully monitor the costs to stay in the budget.
That said, suppliers should not lower prices a lot, and a series of prices discussions is likely, prices for corporate SSD contracts which should increase by 5 to 10% in the fourth quarter of 2025.
To make matters worse, an increase in prices for hard drives is on the way. Western Digital has announced that prices on all hard drive products will gradually increase, to count immediately.
The company quotes an “unprecedented demand” in all its portfolio, because the main reason for these increases and stresses that investment in advanced innovation is a main factor.
The increase in costs affects not only the deployments of large companies, but also small organizations that are looking for the best hard drive for high storage intensity applications.
All of these factors indicate that the storage shortage led by AI will continue to affect well purchase strategies in 2026.
Via Tendency
