Everything AI promises—from insight to innovation—depends on data. Heaps of data.
And because that data increasingly relies on mass-capacity storage, Seagate’s world-leading hard drive innovation has arrived at just the right time.
This is a key takeaway driven home by our CEO Dr. Dave Mosley and his leadership team at the 2025 Investor and Analyst Event. Here are the highlights:
- Seagate’s world-first HAMR-enabled mass-capacity hard drives are now shipping in volume—proven, qualified, and already enabling the AI era. That’s the message Seagate delivered in New York: hard drives are evolving fast enough to support the data age, with visibility to over 100TB per drive (10TB+ per disk).
- Mozaic 3+ has been qualified at multiple hyperscale cloud service providers. Drives enabled with our Mozaic 3+ technology platform, delivering over 3TB+ per disk, are now shipping in volume and have been qualified by three leading cloud service providers, with more in the pipeline.
- Seagate has now shipped over 1 million HAMR drives and delivered 550 exabytes (EB) of capacity in the past year—the equivalent of more than two-thirds of the data stored today across the world’s smartphones.
- Mozaic 4+, beginning qualifications later this year, will reach 4TB+ per disk while doubling internal efficiency.
- A line of sight to 100TB and beyond by 2032 is in view.
Seagate engineers demonstrated 6.5TB per disk in lab conditions in 2024. We now expect to reach a demonstration of 10TB per disk by 2028. The path beyond—to qualifying 100TB+ per drive around 2032—will be enabled by continued HAMR innovation, iron-platinum media, and next-gen platter architectures. 
- Precision nanoengineering underpins Seagate’s advantage.
Among various nanomarvels, Seagate’s platform combines a laser-in-slider photonic system for heat delivery, a plasmonic near-field transducer for pinpoint activation, spintronic sensors for accurate readback, and vertically integrated read/write heads.
“These are atoms-on-atoms engineering,” said Mosley.
“It’s very hard to copy.” CTO John Morris added: “This opens up another decade or more of product innovation.”
- Areal density innovation boosts cost-efficiency, sustainability, and fleet performance.
By increasing the amount of data per square inch, Seagate has been able to reduce the total number of drives needed for large-scale deployments. Compared to 12TB PMR drives (current data center average capacity delivered by previous-generation hard-drive recording technology), Mozaic 4+ delivers:
- 3× better floor space utilization
- 5× improvement in power efficiency
- 7× reduction in carbon emissions
Deploying 1 exabyte (EB), which is equal to 1000 petabytes, with, say, 40TB drives requires 17,000 fewer units than deploying 1EB with 24TB PMR drives—translating into meaningful savings across real estate, energy, and operations.
- AI workloads are driving a surge in long-term storage demand.
Seagate projects 7.2 zettabytes of nearline storage demand over the next four years, exceeding the entire industry's consumption over the last decade. Inferencing, video, machine learning applications? “Let’s just call it all AI,” as Mosley put it. These new applications are generating data at unprecedented scale—data that must be stored securely, affordably, and durably.
- Seagate’s margin profile is strengthening with each density leap.
According to CFO Gianluca Romano, non-GAAP gross margin has risen from 19% to 36%, with a 40% target in sight. Additionally, as revenue moves above $2.6 billion per quarter, gross margin on that incremental revenue is expected to be approximately 50%.
This performance is fueled by continued supply discipline, enhanced demand visibility, optimized pricing, and differentiated products driving profitability.
- HDDs maintain a significant cost and CapEx advantage over NAND flash.
As CCO B.S. Teh emphasized: “Hard drives are still six times cheaper than SSDs, and that gap isn’t going away.” He also noted that HDD CapEx efficiency remains in the 4–6% range, compared to 35%+ for NAND and DRAM. 
- Edge-local storage is expanding rapidly—and Mozaic scales to meet it.
It’s not just about the cloud. With over 150 countries implementing data localization laws (according to UNCTAD), edge deployments are rising fast. Mozaic’s ability to scale from 10TB to 40TB per drive with minimal integration complexity positions it well to meet sovereign and embedded storage needs.
- Seagate is positioned not just to keep up—but to lead.
With a defined path to 10TB per disk, a revitalized operating model, and industry-leading precision photonics, we are not simply responding to demand—we’re shaping it.
In Mosley’s words: “We’re proud of what we do for the world. These are some of the most sophisticated devices ever built.”
View the whole event and peruse the presentation slides here: https://investors.seagate.com/events/event-details/2025/Seagate-2025-Investor-and-Analyst-Event-2025-5KmmN1PxbM/
