Western Digital Plans to Build 100TB Hard Drives by 2029

As AI has become a bigger part in our everyday digital lives, one thing that can't go ignored is data. Data is exploding at a massive scale in the market today. Every Artificial Intelligence model, digital platforms and cloud service all of them are dependent on one important and core thing behind the curtains and that is the storage. Storage that is affordable, reliable, trustworthy and ready to grow. With this said, Western Digital now known as WD is rethinking the meaning and purpose of what hard drives mean in the current age of AI. At their recent Innovation Day, that took place on 6th February, 2026, the company shared a clear roadmap to tell us the future of data storage in the AI era and how they have designed their roadmap around the real

customer needs. Instead of treating the hard drives as the old-school love, they are positioning these hard drives as the most crucial infrastructure for the new AI driven data. The WD also highlighted how the modern hard drives are growing and are getting shaped to handle huge volumes of data while costing very less. And this decision they took is something they thought are very important for AI companies, cloud providers and big enterprises who have huge data storage with them but do not want to pay a hefty amount.In a world where data keeps growing faster and faster, WD as a brand gave a message that the hard drives are not going to go away, instead they will be evolving as an important asset for their customers. Why Does Storage Matters the MostAs Artitficial Intellgence is emerging day by day in every corner of the world, people, companies and the enterprises are getting solely dependent on AI. These AI systems create and consume huge amounts of data every second and every minute. Now this is happening for running AI applications, training these AI models. Now here huge amounts of data is constantly being accessed, stored and processed. Knowing the fact that we have powerful chipsets, GPU’s, but somewhere or the other these two things often get most of the attention in all these works, and none of these technologies can properly work without strong and reliable storage systems behind the scenes. Owais Mohammed, Sales Director for India, the Middle East, and Africa at WD told that the “Storage is the foundation of the AI-driven data economy,” Also he added that “Without high capacity hard drives, training and running AI models will be too expensive. And to cut the expensive cost, a need for better and affordable hard drives are very important in fast growing markets like India. Now this is wear WD came up with big announcements of creating a clear roadmap to give 100TB storage. A Clear Roadmap to 100TB Storage and BeyondWestern Digital announced on its Innovation Day, a focused and a clear plan to build much larger hard drives using two technologies

• ePMR - (energy-assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording)

ePMR what this technology does - It helps a hard drive to store more and more data by using a small amount of extra energy. It then increases capacity without using more hard power or changing how the hard drive is used.

• HAMR - (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording)

This technology uses a tiny amount of heat to write data more tightly on a disk. This makes it a great possibility to store much more data on a one hand hard drive, which is now going to be more important for future-large capacity drives. So WD’s team is working on the 40TB drive, the largest available today, so this storage unit is being tested by major cloud customers and companies to check on how well it performs and other measures, with a productThey also aim to increase capacity to 60TB without using more power and straight go to 100TB by 2029. Making Hard Drives Faster for AI WorkloadsTo train and manage AI, storage is important but with storage what is important is that how fast the storage of data is taking place in this fast AI driven economy. In early times, what used to happen is that AI tasks used to be through expensive flash storage options because regular hard drives were too slow. Now these flash storage options use to cost much more and lasted for some time. To solve this problem, WD is coming with two more technologies to make hard drives faster without compromising on the pockets.

• High Bandwidth Drive Technology - This will help data to get read and written at the same time, making the drives work faster while consuming less power.

• Dual Pivot Technology - This technology will add as a second moving buddy inside the drive, that will help improve speed without reducing the storage capacity.

Now together, these two technologies will make hard drives work up to four to fives times faster than the old drives. All in all these improvements will help and push WD to build large drives up to 100TB at an affordable price and reduce the need for costly SSD’s.