Redefining Storage for the AI Era

Author: Maarten Guijt, Vice-President Europe, Seagate Technology Collection: 2026-OCP-EMEA-Summit-Executive-Sessions

Summary

Maarten Guijt, Seagate's VP for Europe, presented a data-centric argument that AI has fundamentally elevated storage from an afterthought to a first-class infrastructure building block. The central thesis is that AI-generated data has already surpassed the cumulative volume of all human-created content — a crossover that occurred around 2025 — and that the global datasphere is projected to reach 527 ZB by 2029 (up from under 1 ZB in 2005 and 72 ZB in 2020), driven by richer content, replication requirements, longer data retention, and sovereignty-driven edge deployments. This creates an urgent and structural demand for storage capacity that Seagate describes as "sold out over the next two years."

Seagate's response is the Mosaic HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology platform, which has enabled commercially qualified 40 TB drives (shipped to US hyperscalers) and provides a roadmap to 50 TB and 100 TB per drive. The "physics of scale" slide quantifies the infrastructure impact: upgrading from 30 TB to 44 TB drives (via Mozaic 4+) reduces a 1 exabyte deployment from 33,330 to 22,700 units, shrinks floor space from 314 to 214 sq ft, and cuts power from ~2.6 GWh to ~1.80 GWh — a 47% improvement. The terabyte-per-platter roadmap projects growth from 3+ TB/disk in 2024 to 4+ TB by 2026, 5+ TB by 2028, and 10+ TB by 2032, enabled by Mozaic technology.

Europe features prominently as a strategic market: 2,134 funded AI startups (vs. 6,956 in the US), a 39% AI investment CAGR (highest globally), and a €84 billion cloud market growing at 28.5% YoY. Neo and sovereign cloud are the fastest-growing segments within that market, with US hyperscalers' relative share declining from ~79% of Global Market Share 2024 toward sovereign alternatives through 2031.