Tech giant Seagate sees hard drive capacity tripling by 2030 on booming AI demand
Seagate Technology’s headquarters in Scotts Valley, California.
Tony Avelar | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Data storage firm Seagate is working to develop a 100-terabyte hard drive by 2030, touting blistering demand from data centers for the 70-year-old technology in the artificial intelligence boom.
BS Teh, Seagate’s chief commercial officer, told CNBC that the company is aiming to launch such a drive — which would have about three times the capacity of the firm’s top-of-the-line hard drives — by 2030. The largest hard disk drive Seagate currently produces is the 36-terabyte Exos M model, which it launched in January.
“You may be thinking, ‘Who would need it?'” Teh said, referring to the idea of a 100-terabyte hard drive. “Well, plenty.”
“I think there’s definitely strong demand,” he added. “This is a key enabler for the industry to be able to deliver the storage capacity that the market needs, because there’s no other technology that’s able to produce this capacity of storage technology to meet the growth that the market needs.”
Seagate has been touting itself as more of an AI player in recent years amid the rise of foundational models like those being developed by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. In the computer hardware market, the AI boom has largely benefited players like Nvidia which make the graphics processing units needed for training and running AI models.
Climate concerns
But the boom in data centers comes with implications for the environment. Data centers require significant amounts of power to run.
According to the International Energy Agency, a single ChatGPT query uses up an average 2.9 watt-hours per request — nearly 10 times the amount required for a typical Google search — meaning if ChatGPT was used in the 9 billion internet searches done each day, almost 10 terawatt-hours of additional electricity a year would be required.
Teh explained that Seagate is working to address climate concerns surrounding AI’s energy demands by increasing storage density on its hard drives and ensuring its manufacturing is underpinned by renewable energy.
“We focus on what we can influence, and what we can influence comes down to how we have a sustainable way to manufacture the product,” Teh said. “We have a target to make sure that all of our factories are using renewable energy to manufacture the product.”
“With the product itself, we design it to have lower power per terabyte, or to have higher density of the device itself, such that when you actually integrate that product into your data center, you require less space, less power, less everything, because you’re using your fewer drives to fulfill that capacity,” he added.
It’s worth highlighting that Seagate faces competition from other technologies — not least from solid-state drives, which use flash memory chips rather than magnetic platters to store data electronically. However, Teh insists hard disk drive is “a much more sustainable device technology” than solid-state drives in terms of the embodied carbon.
Technology
StubHub IPO is back on for September after ticketing company delayed plans on tariff concerns
StubHub, the ticketing marketplace that spun out of eBay in 2020, has resumed its plans to go public and is now aiming to hold its IPO next month, CNBC has learned.
The company originally paused its IPO plans in April as the stock market was reeling from President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs. The decision came after StubHub submitted its prospectus in March indicating it would list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “STUB.”
StubHub now expects to kick off its IPO roadshow after Labor Day, Sept. 1, and make its debut later in the month, according to a source familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the discussions are confidential.
The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
StubHub also filed an updated IPO prospectus on Monday. It reported revenue growth in the first quarter of 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. Operating income came in at $26.8 million for the period, after the company lost $883,000 in the year-ago period, but its net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.
The IPO market has come to life in recent months after an extended dry spell due to high inflation and rising interest rates. A flurry of startups have made their public debuts, including rocket maker Firefly Aerospace, design software company Figma, crypto firm Circle and AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave. Bullish, the cryptocurrency exchange that counts Peter Thiel as an investor, also filed its IPO prospectus last month.
StubHub has been a longtime player in the ticketing industry since its launch in 2000. It was purchased by eBay for $310 million in 2007, but was reacquired by its co-founder Eric Baker in 2020 for $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.
The company had sought a $16.5 billion valuation before it began the IPO process, CNBC previously reported. StubHub didn’t provide an expected pricing range for its shares in the filing.
As it prepares to go public, StubHub is contending with hefty competition in the online ticketing market. In addition to Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation, StubHub is up against secondary market companies, including Vivid Seats, SeatGeek and TicketNetwork
For the first quarter, StubHub reported gross merchandise sales of $2.08 billion, up 15% from a year prior. That was a slowdown from 47% expansion the previous quarter. StubHub said GMS, or the total value paid by buyers for tickets and fulfillment, builds in each quarter and that initial sales for major concert tours typically occur near the end of the year.
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) listens as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks in the Cross Hall of the White House during an event on “Investing in America” on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
President Donald Trump on Monday said that he initially asked Nvidia for a 20% cut of the chipmaker’s sales to China, but the number came down to 15% after CEO Jensen Huang negotiated with him.
The comments came after news broke over the weekend that Nvidia agreed to pay the federal government a 15% cut in return for receiving export control licenses that will allow it to once again sell the H20 chip to China and Chinese companies. Nvidia’s Huang visited Trump in the White House on Friday.
“I said, ‘listen, I want 20% if I’m going to approve this for you, for the country,'” Trump said in a press conference in Washington.
Trump said that Nvidia’s H20 is an “old chip that China already has” and is “obsolete.” He compared the H20 chip to Nvidia’s current fastest artificial intelligence chip, which is called Blackwell, and said that he wouldn’t allow those to be sold to China without significant downgrades, such as a 30% to 50% reduction in performance.
“The Blackwell is super-duper advanced. I wouldn’t make a deal with that,” Trump said, adding that it was possible to make a deal for a “somewhat enhanced in a negative way” version of Blackwell.
“That’s the latest and the greatest in the world. Nobody has it. They won’t have it for five years,” Trump said.
One reason for the U.S. export controls is fear that providing advanced chips to China could allow the foreign power to leapfrog the U.S. in AI capabilities. Many have said that could pose a threat to the national security of the U.S.
Trump said that China already has chips with some similar capabilities to the H20.
Huang has said that it is better for U.S. national security if Chinese AI developers use U.S. technology, and that denying them access to Nvidia chips would actually encourage the Chinese chip industry to develop and catch up.
“He’s selling a essentially old chip,” Trump said. “Huawei has a similar chip.”
The H20 is a Chinese-specific chip that has had its performance slowed down. It is related to Nvidia’s H100 and H200 chips that are used in the U.S. The H20 was introduced after the Biden administration implemented export controls on AI chips in 2023.
In April, the Trump administration said it would require a license to export the H20 chip, and in May, Huang said that “effectively closed” the market off to Nvidia. Huang said that Nvidia was expecting to sell about $8 billion in H20 chips in the July quarter before sales were stopped.
“While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide,” an Nvidia spokesperson told CNBC on Monday.
Trump on Monday also said that Huang plans to visit him again to negotiate export licenses for the Blackwell chips.
“I think he’s coming to see me again about that,” Trump said.
A White House official confirmed to CNBC that AMD, the second-place AI chip maker, will also pay 15% to receive an export license for its China-focused AI chip, the Instinct MI308.
WATCH: Nvidia, AMD to pay U.S. 15% of AI chip sales in China to secure export licenses
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