Seagate says the AI infrastructure boom is driving unprecedented demand for its high-capacity hard drives, as cloud providers race to buy mass-storage hardware to cope with data generated and retained by AI applications. The company reports that datacentre customers now account for around 90 percent of its exabyte shipments, and long-term supply agreements have already claimed most of its nearline drive capacity through to 2028, underlining how AI's appetite for storage is proving just as significant as its well-documented demand for memory chips.

CEO Dave Mosley said hyperscalers show no sign of pulling back on their planning horizons, with demand increasingly coming from agentic AI applications that retain data for historical context, compliance and reuse via key-value caching across memory, SSD and hard drive tiers. Much of Seagate's capacity growth has come from packing more disks and heads into each drive rather than selling more units, per CFO Gianluca Romano. The demand surge helped lift full-year revenue by 34 percent to $12.2 billion, with fourth-quarter revenue up 50 percent year-on-year to $3.6 billion, and the company forecasting around 56 percent growth in the current quarter.