Holy TB: Coaching and managing complicated AI fashions requires not solely important computing energy but additionally huge fleets of succesful storage gadgets. Seagate plans to construct a brand new AI-focused enterprise round this want, creating new disk drives with unprecedented storage capacities within the not-so-distant future.
Seagate expects to launch a 100-terabyte onerous disk drive by 2030, anticipating that AI corporations would require such huge storage for his or her more and more complicated chatbots and generative AI providers. Based on B.S. Teh, who oversees Seagate’s international business technique improvement and operations, there’ll quickly be appreciable demand for terribly massive drives primarily based on confirmed magnetic storage know-how.
At the moment, Seagate’s largest onerous drive is the 36TB Exos M mannequin, launched earlier this yr. The corporate has just lately invested closely in advancing HDD-based options to maintain growing storage capability. Seagate is a significant proponent of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), a know-how that reinforces knowledge density through the use of a laser diode connected to every recording head to extend the variety of bits saved on a magnetic floor.
Seagate can also be pursuing further breakthroughs, together with NVMe-based HDDs aimed toward considerably bettering the reliability and sustainability of storage techniques in enterprise and knowledge middle environments.
Like Nvidia and plenty of different tech corporations at present, Seagate now manufacturers itself as an “AI firm,” signaling the place it believes the cash is – or can be – within the coming years.
“A key factor to having fun with surging revenues within the AI trade is offering the storage capability AI corporations want,” Teh said in a current interview. “Nothing matches onerous disk drives in assembly this rising demand.” The 70-year-old HDD know-how stays well-suited for the anticipated increase in AI knowledge facilities, at the same time as analysts and NGOs increase considerations in regards to the environmental and vitality impacts of this pattern.
The Worldwide Vitality Company estimates {that a} single ChatGPT question consumes as much as 2.9 watt-hours of energy, whereas a easy Google search is sort of 10 instances extra environment friendly. Seagate is addressing environmental considerations by specializing in elements it could actually affect by its enterprise and manufacturing practices.
Newer onerous disk drives are designed to both decrease energy consumption per terabyte or improve knowledge density. As prospects combine these drives into their knowledge facilities, Teh instructed they may profit from diminished area, vitality, and useful resource necessities. Moreover, Seagate is working to cut back the environmental footprint of its manufacturing crops by incorporating renewable vitality sources.
