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Podcast: AI to boost drive innovation in 2025

We talk to Jason Feist of Seagate about artificial intelligence and how it is driving drive innovation, the growth of data and how sustainability and energy efficiency is vital to meeting capacity needs

In this podcast, we talk with Jason Feist, senior vice-president for business and markets at drive giant Seagate, about his predictions for 2025.

Feist emphasised the continuing effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on data growth, how the industry will meet the challenge to supply that capacity, and the need for sustainability and energy efficiency in spinning disk storage.

Feist also talks about hard drives, their energy use and suitability for massive stores of data.

The first point I think you want to talk about is about the AI boom and how that’s driving innovation in storage

It’s an exciting time in the storage industry and AI is adding fuel to this excitement. As you’ve seen in the industry to date, there’s been a lot of discussion about the scale and the ability to deploy AI globally, and what it’s going to take from a resource point of view to do so. Up to 72% of businesses are already using AI today.

There’s been research published that shows this is going to continue to grow, both in work and personal use cases. What’s exciting for us is now that data is becoming more and more prevalent in that discussion. You can hear it in large hyperscaler commentary around the importance of data to create good models.


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And you can also think about it when humans and personal use cases mature, that the importance of being trustworthy and having data that can validate what the AI is doing and what decisions it’s making will become even more important moving forward.

So therefore, I think the prediction that I look forward to this year is seeing that there’s going to be an increased focus on ensuring that data is stored and that data can be called upon to validate what decisions are being made and how AI is utilising that information.

The next point we’re going to talk about is about data as a critical asset. And in fact, the belief that you have that there’s a shortage of data and how the industry will address that

This part is really exciting. Data is growing at unprecedented volumes. There are so many new use cases that are generating information.

When you think about electric cars, and electrification, and the usage of text-to-video, and voice-to-video, and all of the new things that are being created that generate very rich content, that are larger in file sizes, it shows clearly that data is growing. And now that compute is starting to scale along with that, there’s the ability to analyse and understand and turn that valuable information into something actionable. Today, there are tons of use cases that are both personal as well as cloud-focused, with cloud seeing sizeable growth moving forward.

And as we look at the economies of scale that that provides, hard drives are a great asset to help those industries and those use cases develop. What we need to be careful of and what we need to watch this year is that with this ever-growing need of data and storage requirements coming from new applications, we run the risk of having a shortage if we don’t plan appropriately. We are still a physical hardware device that requires collaboration, planning and innovation to support that supply need and that demand curve.

So, it’s going to be critically important over this year and next year to ensure that we don’t run into a shortage crisis by making those demand signals very visible and talking about that storage growth more and more.

I got it slightly wrong there – it’s not shortage of data, but you’re concerned that we might have a shortage of media?

Yeah, I think there’s no constraint on the devices and the capabilities to generate data. The real constraint becomes where can you physically keep all of that information back to the first point of trustworthiness and the ability to audit and analyse how a decision was made or how a model was created. We now need to store all of that information cost-effectively at scale, such that you can go back and make sure you develop trust for that, and that is where the looming shortage could emerge if not appropriately planned for.

That leads nicely to the third point I think you want to make, which is about the need for larger storage devices and for those to be sustainable and energy efficient

Yeah, we only get one planet, so it’s always important for us to ... be very efficient with our resources because resource scarcity is a megatrend that will never go away on the planet. Therefore, at Seagate, we continue to strive for innovation and make sure we can grow the capacity of a hard drive and utilise as much recycled content as possible. We’re working with large customers and different industries to be able to safely use material in a circular fashion and bring things back into our supply chain to create additional efficiency and sustainable practice.

We’re working with large customers and different industries to be able to safely use material in a circular fashion and bring things back into our supply chain to create additional efficiency and sustainable practice
Jason Feist, Seagate

In addition to that, as we grow the capacity of a hard drive, we’re creating volumetric efficiency within datacentres, so now they can store more and more information in a resource that is growing rapidly and is going to be required for AI applications to scale. We need to be able to continue to bring in larger devices without consuming more power to do so, because that power, and the impact that power has on datacentres, is so precious. They want to allocate as much of that precious resource towards analysing the information, so that’s where hard drives are very efficient at storing more information and doing so power efficiently. 

To sum up, I think you’ve been telling us that you think there’s going to be an AI boom that will drive innovation in terms of media, and in particular drives and hard drives; that data is ever more a critical asset and that we need to ensure there will be sufficient capacity; and that all of this is driving the need for ever larger storage devices that will be sustainable. Is that a fair reflection of your comments today?

That’s a great assessment. It’s super exciting to be part of such a growing and ever-changing ecosystem and we hope to continue to play a critical part in not only storing the world’s information, but allowing all of these new applications to continue to generate data, so it can be analysed efficiently and create additional insight.

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