Inside Seagate’s vision for sustainable data centers in the AI era

As artificial intelligence accelerates the global shift to a data-centric economy, the demands on data infrastructure—particularly data centers—have become immense. In a keynote speech at this year's Computex Taipei, Colin Presly, vice president of customer engineering at Seagate Technology, predicted that the world's data boom is outpacing our ability to store and manage it sustainably.
 
“This is my first time at Computex,” Colin Presly said. “And it's incredible to witness the level of innovation in our industry. We are transitioning from a digital economy to a data economy,” he said, “and AI is the engine driving this transformation.”
 
Colin Presly was one of the key note speakers in Computex' forum that dealt with data center technology. IDC predicts that the global data volume will triple from 2023 to 2028 to reach a total of 394 ZB, Colin Presly noted. A zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes. Yet the storage industry currently produces only one to two zettabytes of storage capacity annually. “We are creating far more data than we can store,” he said. “The question is not just how much can be stored, but how much should be—and whether it can be done sustainably.”
 

The Data Center Dilemma

The sharp rise in AI applications has created a double-edged sword. On one hand, organizations are hungry for data to feed AI algorithms. In a Seagate survey of more than 1,000 IT professionals, 72% said they currently use AI, and 90% of them affirmed that retaining more data improves the quality of AI outcomes.
 
On the other hand, storing and processing that data comes with both financial and environmental costs. Decarbonizing Data Report, a separate Seagate survey of more than 300 data center professionals identified high energy consumption (53.5%) and raw material requirements (49.5%) as the top barriers to sustainable data center growth. Other concerns included space constraints (45.5%), infrastructure costs (28.5%), and acquisition costs (27%).
 
These challenges have data center operators considering three strategies: scaling up existing infrastructure, scaling out to build new data centers, or migrating workloads to the cloud. But as Colin Presly pointed out, each approach has its own limits. Power availability, land constraints, and capital costs all act as bottlenecks.
 

The environmental paradox

Colin Presly's presentation highlighted a growing disconnect between corporate sustainability commitments and actual purchasing decisions in the data center industry. The energy challenge is particularly acute as graphics processing units for AI applications consume substantially more power than traditional computing workloads, straining electrical infrastructure that is often difficult and expensive to upgrade.
 
While 95% of those surveyed expressed concern about their environmental footprint, only 3.3% prioritized sustainability in purchasing decisions. "We have a classic case where sustainability is top of mind but not top of wallet," Colin Presly observed. "Cost still drives most decisions, but we're reaching a point where these two priorities must align."
 
“Sustainability and total cost of ownership (TCO) have been seen as opposing forces,” Colin Presly added. “But they don’t have to be. With intention and innovation, they can work together.”
 

Seagate's sustainable storage blueprint

Seagate is relying on several technological approaches to address the sustainability challenge. Presly outlined Seagate's multi-pronged approach to bridging this gap—delivering scale and performance while cutting carbon emissions and resource usage.

1. Higher areal density and dual actuators

At the core of Seagate's innovation strategy is increasing areal density—the amount of data capacity that can be stored on a single disk. Seagate's latest hard drives use Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, branded as Mozaic 3+ platform. A laser precisely heats the disk surface to over 427°C (800°F), which then cools again in less than two nanoseconds, to lower magnetic resistance, allowing more bits to be recorded on each disk, enabling tighter data packing and increasing capacity to more than 3 terabytes per disk. In the lab, Seagate has demonstrated capacities of up to 6.5 terabytes per disk, paving the way for 65-terabyte drives.
 
“More data in less space means less power, fewer materials, and reduced cost per terabyte,” said Colin Presly. Mozaic 3+-powered Exos M drives offer three times the data center capacity in the same footprint of current Exos X 10TB drives, 25% lower cost per terabyte, and a dramatically smaller power- and embodied carbon-per terabyte.
 
Complementing this, Seagate's dual actuator technology allows two separate read/write arms to operate inside a single hard drive. The result: double the performance without increasing the device's physical size or power consumption. “It's like getting twice the output for the same terabyte,” Colin Presly said.
 

2. Circularity and reuse

Colin Presly also took aim at a hidden sustainability crisis: e-waste. “Roughly 200 million hard drives are shredded each year,” he said. “They're turned to dust, often out of security concerns.”
 
To combat this, Seagate has launched programs that refurbish and reuse drives. One key enabler is Seagate Secure, a suite of encryption and data sanitization tools that make it safe to reuse drives without physically destroying them. “We’ve reclaimed more than a metric ton of rare earth magnets from old drives,” Colin Presly said.
 
Seagate is also championing “autonomous drive regeneration” (ADR), which allows failing drives to deactivate only defective surfaces—extending their usable life. Alongside this, Seagate Advanced Distributed Autonomic Protection Technology (ADAPT) enhances drive rebuild time that's 95% faster than traditional RAID solutions, further reducing waste.
 

3. Supply chain and life cycle impact

The environmental paradox is evident. Despite 92% of the survey respondents agreeing that life cycle impacts are important—they rarely factor into purchase decisions. Only 15% ranked lifecycle as a top priority. “That disconnect has to change,” Colin Presly said.
 
Seagate prioritizes sustainability beyond the data center floor and across its value chain, measuring its carbon footprint across three scopes: direct emissions from operations (Scope 1), indirect emissions from purchased energy (Scope 2), and all other indirect emissions — both upstream and downstream — including those from its supply chain and product use (Scope 3).  

Rethinking storage architecture

Colin Presly also addressed the broader storage landscape, comparing the carbon efficiency of hard drives, solid-state drives (SSDs), and magnetic tape.
 
While SSDs are crucial for speed—especially near GPUs in AI workloads—they carry higher embodied carbon costs. Hard drives, by contrast, offer the best ratio of storage density to carbon impact. Even compared to magnetic tape, hard drives perform better in some real-world configurations.
 
“The takeaway isn't that hard drives should replace everything,” Colin Presly said. “It's about being intentional—deploying the right mix of storage technologies to optimize cost, performance, and sustainability.”
 
One of Seagate’s newest developments on this front is integrating NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) interfaces directly into hard drives. Traditionally used for SSDs, NVMe offers faster data transfer and simplified architecture. At Computex, Seagate demonstrated native NVMe hard drives connecting directly to GPUs via DPU (Data Processing Units).
 
“This brings the hard drive physically and architecturally closer to AI workloads,” Colin Presly explained. “It's a glimpse into a future where NVMe becomes the universal storage interface.”
 

Toward the age of sustainable AI

“AI drives the future, but it depends on data. And data depends on storage” said Colin Presly. As organizations rush to harness the power of AI, the need for sustainable data storage has never been more pressing. Seagate’s innovations unveiled at Computex signal that the storage industry is not only aware of this imperative but is actively engineering a path forward.
 
“The volume of data isn't slowing,” Colin Presly said. “Our challenge is to ensure that the infrastructure supporting it doesn't slow our planet down.”