Pune: Seagate Technology is placing its Pune operations at the centre of its India growth strategy, as artificial intelligence drives a new wave of data centre expansion and storage demand.
Calling India a "super important region globally", chief technology officer John Morris pointed to the scale of planned infrastructure build-out. "Over the next five years, in excess of $40 billion investment equivalent [is being planned] in data centre infrastructure," he said, adding that the growth could mean "potentially a 5x increase in data centre infrastructure over this five-year period, let's say to 2030." Of that, he noted, "We would expect 20% of that to be storage-related investment."
The Pune site plays a broad operational and engineering role in that push. "We have sales coverage here for sure," Morris said, but added that the facility spans far more. "We do software and systems development here. We do research here in areas like edge appliances and AI. There are electronics architectures that we can use on our products… a rapid prototyping capability for electronics that we operate out of the site here. We do compliance testing, product assurance, system integration testing and so forth."
That engineering depth feeds directly into Seagate's technology roadmap, anchored by HAMR, or heat-assisted magnetic recording. The platform has been decades in the making. "We started developing HAMR over 20 years ago," Morris said. "The early years were all research… we transitioned the development from research focus to product integration focus maybe 10 years ago, and over the last 10 years, it has progressively ramped up into full product development."
The company has now moved the technology into scale. "We qualified our first customer at the end of 2024," he said. "We have now qualified essentially all the major CSPs on our latest Mozaic platform essentially, and reached a point where we've scaled it into volume production… shipping over one and a half million Mozaic drives a quarter."
Morris described AI as a structural demand driver that has helped push the industry back towards peak levels after a downturn. "For roughly the last eight or nine quarters, there's been industry growth quarter over quarter," he said. Demand is "approaching record highs, partly driven by AI, and the impact AI has had on the intrinsic value of data."
Enterprises, he added, increasingly see data as an asset rather than overhead. "More and more enterprises have recognised that there is a lot of potential value in data, and because of that, and the ability for AI to help them kind of unlock that intrinsic value, it's definitely stimulating the demand for storage."
On architecture, Morris does not foresee a near-term shift away from hard drives in hyperscale deployments. "You start to see things like ratios of 80% hard drive, 20% SSD, and even as high as 95% hard drive and 5% SSD," he said, depending on workloads. "There's nothing in the 10-year horizon that fundamentally changes the value proposition of that type of architecture."
The underlying economics, he argued, still favour disk for bulk storage. "If you put high gain on recency, which is probably not the right thing to do, the economics of hard disk drives have actually significantly improved relative to flash over the last couple of years."
HAMR itself represents a generational shift in recording technology. "Every 20 years, there's a fairly significant change in recording technology," Morris said, tracing the move from longitudinal to perpendicular recording, and now to HAMR. "We fully expect that design space to scale like perpendicular did… we believe we can scale it over 20 years."
Seagate has already mapped out capacity milestones. "We've already announced roadmaps up to five terabytes per disk… initial customer engagements… late 2027, early 2028," he said, with "10TB per disk configuration in 2032."
Cloud computing laid the groundwork for this phase of innovation, Morris said, shifting data centres from "cost centres" into platforms that lowered "the barrier to innovation." AI has amplified that shift. Without cloud scale, "you wouldn't have seen the level of innovation across so many small companies," he said, as computational costs would have been "onerous or even impossible."
For Seagate, that convergence of cloud, AI and exponential data growthunderpins both its global roadmap and its India focus. As India's infrastructure expands, Pune's mix of software, hardware and systems capability positions the company to support what Morris called a coming "boom" in data centre growth, with storage at its core.
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