Despite industry challenges, Seagate confident of growth in region

“AI will continue to be a key catalyst of our growth. It presents a compelling opportunity for Seagate, as Seagate is the first and the only company to commercialize and volume ship HAMR-based 30+TB drives,” says Futoshi Niizuma, Seagate Technology’s Vice President for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) Business.

Seagate continues to gain momentum across the Asia Pacific region with AI data center operations accelerating demand. According to Futoshi Niizuma, Seagate Technology’s Vice President for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) Business, the second half of the year is promising to enable more growth for Seagate.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Niizuma shares how AI is driving Seagate’s growth as well as the challenges faced in the industry currently.

Can you share how the demand for AI infrastructure is contributing to Seagate's growth in the region?

As we move into the second half of the year, Seagate continues to gain momentum across the APJ region, driven by accelerating demand for AI data centre operations.

AI is fundamentally transforming the data infrastructure landscape. It is a significant driver for Seagate as data storage needs accelerate rapidly – especially since data is at the heart of AI’s success. AI workloads require vast amounts of data storage with high performance and reliability, which aligns well with Seagate portfolio.

We are seeing this trend in the APJ region as well, particularly fuelled by digital transformation efforts across industries and government agencies. The region’s diverse markets and growing cloud infrastructure in the region make it a critical focus for Seagate’s expansion efforts.

Looking ahead, AI will continue to be a key catalyst of our growth. It presents a compelling opportunity for Seagate, as Seagate is the first and the only company to commercialize and volume ship HAMR-based 30+TB drives. Mozaic 3+, a platform that incorporates Seagate’s unique implementation of HAMR, is the foundation of our roadmap through 2030, which include 50TB+ and 100TB drives. We continue to invest in technologies like HAMR that support scalable, efficient and secure data storage tailored for AI applications, while also maintaining operational flexibility and sustainability. This reinforces our confidence in delivering long-term value to customers and partners across APJ and beyond.

What are the biggest challenges Seagate is currently facing in the industry? Is it just supply chain issues or are geopolitics also hampering growth plans?

All businesses today, not just Seagate, face a broad range of challenges including operating in a geopolitically sensitive environment where regional data sovereignty laws, trade policy complexities, and evolving regulatory frameworks.

In the APJ region specifically, the diversity of regulatory environments and varying data governance requirements add complexity to the market. This calls for a great level of business agility. In addition, infrastructure maturity varies widely across the markets, influencing how and where data solutions can and should be deployed effectively.

Another important challenge that our customers face is the growing emphasis on energy efficiency and sustainability. As cloud providers and enterprise customers place greater importance on green technologies, Seagate continues to innovate to deliver high performance products that minimizing environmental impacts while balancing cost.

These challenges have not hampered our growth plans but rather shaped how we innovate and operate. Adapting to a fast-changing technology landscape, evolving customer needs and strategic shifts in data storage requires resilience and agility. In APJ, we focus on staying close to customers and respond quickly to regional developments.

How is the competition in the industry looking like, especially in the storage space?

Storage industry remains highly competitive and fast evolving, driven by explosive data growth and shifting demands from AI, cloud and edge computing. This trend is especially pronounced in the APJ region, where rapid digital transformation and widespread AI adoption are fuelling unprecedented data expansion.

Hard drives continue to be the preferred choice for data centres and cloud providers, owing to their unmatched areal density, reliability and environmental advantages. Seagate continues to lead the industry with advanced technologies like HAMR, which are central to achieving next-generation capacities by pushing storage areal density beyond 3.6TB per platter, all while improving sustainability. This gives us a strategic edge in meeting the long-term storage needs of hyperscale and empowers organisations to unlock the full potential of their data at scale and with economies of scale.

For performance-intensive workload such as AI training and inference, gaming, content creation and advanced data analytics, Seagate is also innovating in this space by exploring NVMe-compatible hard drives through POC (proof of concept), bridging the gap between performance and scalability.

In today’s landscape, with AI and the fact that it will require and produce vast amount of data, it isn’t just about capacity or speed. It is about delivering scalable, energy-efficient storage that empowers organisations to fully realise the value of their data, while meeting the performance needs of AI and the sustainability targets of tomorrow.

Seagate plans to develop a 100 terabyte hard drive by 2030. How exciting is this project and the importance it brings to the industry?

The development of a 100TB hard drive by 2030 is more than a technical milestone – it pushes the limits of what is possible in data storage. Building on our proven HAMR technology, this represents a critical and strategic response to the world’s accelerating data needs and the growing imperative to unlock its true value of data at scale in the AI era.

AI’s power lies in its ability to learn from vast, complex datasets. Unlocking AI’s full potential requires storage solutions that can efficiently store, access, analyse and scale this data without compromise. Data has become the most valuable asset in today’s digital economy, driving everything from advanced AI models to scientific breakthroughs and global digital initiatives.

Today, nearly 90% of data in data centres resides on hard drives, according to IDC. With hard drives delivering a 6x cost-per-TB advantage over SSDs, they remain the backbone of scalable storage. This HAMR breakthrough reinforces the foundational role of hard drives in delivering scalable, energy-efficient, durable storage infrastructure.

This isn’t merely a capacity increase; it's a strategic enabler of AI-driven future and the immense value data holds. As datasets become more complex, organisations need storage solutions that combine density with efficiency, without compromising on performance.

As data grows in strategic importance, HDDs offer the scale and economics needed to unlock its full potential.