ИИ-бум вернул спрос на жёсткие диски — производители HDD наращивают мощности

Manufacturers of components for hard disk drives (HDD) are ramping up production capacity due to sustained demand from servers and data centers. As reported in July 2026 by the publication 3DNews, the artificial intelligence boom has revived interest in classic storage drives, which until recently were considered a fading niche.

Why AI breathed new life into hard drives

Demand for HDDs is being sustained by the server segment, where the volume of stored data is growing faster than solid-state drives are getting cheaper. Training and running AI models generates enormous volumes of data — training datasets, logs, checkpoints, intermediate results — that need to be stored cheaply and in large quantities. Here, 3.5-inch HDDs with capacities of tens of terabytes retain a key advantage over SSDs: price per terabyte. According to 3DNews's assessment, even before the AI hype, it seemed that classic drives were turning into a niche product and gradually giving way to solid-state drives, but the server market has changed that picture.

What HDD manufacturers are doing

Manufacturers of components for hard disk drives have decided to ramp up capacity — a direct response to increased orders from data centers. This is not about the assemblers of finished drives themselves, but about the suppliers of components on which the volume of drive output depends. The decision to expand production is itself a signal that the demand is being perceived not as a short-term spike, but as a sustained trend requiring investment in equipment and production lines.

"Manufacturers of components for HDDs consider it appropriate to begin

ramping up capacity," the 3DNews article states.

Why this matters for the storage market

HDDs and SSDs in data centers are no longer either-or competitors and are dividing roles between themselves. Solid-state drives take on hot data and access speed, while hard drives handle mass, cheap storage of "warm" and "cold" information that is accessed less often. AI workloads generate data of both types simultaneously, so demand is growing for both categories at once. For HDD manufacturers, this means it is too early to write off the segment: according to 3DNews, artificial intelligence infrastructure has given hard drives a second wind.

What this means

The artificial intelligence boom is reshaping not only the market for graphics cards and chips, but also the "boring" storage drive segment. Hard drives, which were already being prepared to be relegated to obsolete technology, have received a new source of demand in servers and data centers — and component manufacturers have deemed this demand reliable enough to invest in expanding output.