The growing significance of large-scale, affordable storage in the era of artificial intelligence is highlighted by Western Digital’s intentions to build hard drives with capacities of up to 100 terabytes by 2029. 

The corporation announced at its Innovation Day on February 6, 2026, that it is moving away from legacy storage technology and toward hard disk drives (HDDs) as essential infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and hyperscale data centers. Western Digital thinks high-capacity HDDs are still essential to controlling storage costs since AI models generate and consume enormous volumes of data. 

Energy-assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (ePMR), which increases density by employing extra energy, and Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), which employs precise heating to write data more densely on disks, are two important technologies that the company is developing to scale capacity. Major cloud clients are already testing Western Digital’s 40TB drives, according to the company, with plans to scale to 60TB and eventually 100TB without a corresponding rise in power consumption. 

High-bandwidth drive topologies and dual-pivot mechanisms, which the business claims may provide four to five times faster rates than traditional HDDs, are also being introduced to meet the performance requirements for AI applications. 

Executives emphasized that in order to make AI implementation financially feasible at scale, dependable, reasonably priced storage will be crucial. 

Source – Times Now