Seagate's 32TB HDDs Launch Expands Its Reach in AI Video Analytics

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (STX) is rolling out new edge-to-cloud storage solutions, comprising 32TB hard disk drives (“HDD”) across the Exos, SkyHawk AI and IronWolf Pro portfolios. The company will be demonstrating these mass-capacity storage solutions at Intersec 2026, highlighting its role in supporting AI-driven video analytics and data-intensive applications.

The expansion comes as AI-powered video image analytics (“VIA”) fuels rapid data creation at the network edge. Citing an IDC report, STX highlighted that more than three-quarters of organizations expect their video data volumes to at least double over the next five years. This is due to AI-generated annotations, summaries and metadata for every frame. This trend is driving an increasing demand for scalable, cost-efficient storage that can handle massive data flows while maintaining searchable archives.

By extending new 32TB hard disk drives to channel and retail partners, Seagate aims to help enterprise customers scale AI workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. These new drives are built on STX’s CMR technology.

Management continues to highlight that mass-capacity HDDs remain essential for AI-powered video analytics adoption. As VIA use cases expand across smart cities, retail and critical infrastructure, Seagate’s latest shipments position it to capture long-term storage demand growth.

However, this opportunity is unfolding in an already intensely competitive market, where Seagate faces tough competition from traditional HDD companies, such as Western Digital Corporation (WDC), as well as flash-based alternatives. Seagate’s early commercialization of 32TB drives across multiple product lines is likely to provide a meaningful differentiation.

Let’s Look at How Rivals Are Stacking Up

Western Digital remains one of Seagate’s closest competitors. The rapid adoption of AI and data-intensive workloads at hyperscalers is fueling strong demand for its solutions. Customers are transitioning to higher-capacity drives, with shipments of its latest ePMR products offering up to 26TB CMR and 32TB UltraSMR surpassing 2.2 million units in the September quarter. The reliability, scalability and TCO benefits of its ePMR and UltraSMR technologies remain key to Western Digital’s success in the data center market.

Western Digital plans to build on this with its next-generation HAMR drives. All top seven customers have issued purchase orders through the first half of 2026, with five extending through year-end and one major hyperscale customer securing supply for all of 2027.

Among flash-based alternatives, Pure Storage (PSTG) is one of the prominent players in the data storage space. Increasing adoption of flash storage, advantages of all-flash arrays in data centers, strong partner base and growth prospects in emerging data-driven markets are key positives.

Pure Storage continues to focus on innovations tailored for modern data workloads, particularly AI, containerization and high-performance computing. In addition to hardware and architectural innovation, Pure Storage advanced its cloud-native storage strategy. Pure Storage’s Pure1 AI Copilot continues to evolve as a differentiated control plane for modern infrastructure management. The Portworx Pure1 AI Copilot stands out as the first AI-powered platform engineering assistant purpose-built for Kubernetes-native storage. Its integration with MCP servers enables deeper and more seamless AI workflow integration across enterprise environments.

STX Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

In the past month, STX’s shares have increased 12.5% compared with the Computer Integrated Systems industry’s growth of 11.2%.

In terms of forward price/earnings, STX’s shares are trading at 24.33X, higher than the industry’s 17.73X.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for STX’s earnings for fiscal 2026 has been revised up 2.2% to $11.26 over the past 60 days.

Currently, Seagate sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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