https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/23/seagate_hdd_prices/Seagate has joined Western Digital in increasing the prices of hard drives, with rising demand due to the huge data requirements of AI taking the blame.
Seagate informed customers that it is increasing prices effective immediately for new orders, but also for any changes to orders that are “over and above” previously committed volumes.
It comes just a couple of weeks after rival manufacturer Western Digital sent out a similar letter to customers informing them of price hikes soon.
The rising demand comes from
>AI training requiring huge volumes of data: OpenAI's GPT-3 model is said to have been trained using 45TB of data, which may have been surpassed for newer models.
>Seagate launched the first 30TB hard drive line just last year.On the decreased manufacture of HDD:
“We can point the finger at COVID. Reduced global business and manufacturing activity during the pandemic caused a decrease in demand for disk drives and cloud storage. This resulted in a massive surplus in hard drive supply. It’s temporary, but the HDD surplus is still hurting sales and negatively impacting HDD stocks,” Conner wrote.
The danger is that it will take a long time to fire up the HDD production engine again, he warned. It looks like buyers may face inflated prices for the foreseeable future.
Trendforce says there is an expectation of ongoing supply shortages for high-capacity HDD products this quarter and potentially throughout the entire year.
>Samsung held more than 40 percent market share in the enterprise SSD sector during Q4 of 2023, while Solidigm stood at 32 percent.Samsung however does not make mechanical HDDs anymore, they did many years ago though. Now they are the defining SSD giant.
The outlook then is that AI demand is likely to see a
>price increase for both HDD and SDD datacenter products in the near future, at least if TrendForce is right. But he usually is. 
