🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Nearline HDD supply is booked through 2027

• Seagate says its nearline hard disk drive (HDD) capacity is fully booked through calendar 2026. Long-term agreements with large cloud customers already run through calendar 2027 1.
• Those orders span years, as cloud providers lock in supply for AI data center buildouts. Several cloud service providers are already discussing demand for calendar 2028 1.
• Demand is centered on next-generation high-capacity drives that use Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), a technology that uses heat to store more data on each disk. Seagate says its Mozaic™ 4+ platform is qualified and in production with two leading hyperscale cloud providers, meaning very large cloud companies. Drives with capacities up to 44TB are shipping in volume to those two customers 2.
• Storage demand now depends less on PC sales and more on enterprise buying. Seagate’s data-center business made up 80% of total revenue in fiscal Q1 2026 3.

The tight HDD market is affecting nearby storage segments

• Retail HDD prices rose 20 to 50%. Some hyperscalers and server original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) moved to solid-state drives (SSDs) to cover large-capacity HDD shortages, which added pressure to NAND flash memory and SSD supply 4.
• Seagate sold its Lyve Cloud business to Wasabi Technologies, a cloud storage company, and took a stake in Wasabi. That move ended Seagate’s direct operation of Lyve Cloud and narrowed its focus to mass-capacity storage technology 5.
• Seagate says higher density can cut power per terabyte. Using fewer drives for the same capacity can also reduce space and energy use in data centers 6.