The 2026 storage crisis: Why AI data centers are hoarding every hard drive on the market
www.howtogeek.com

... HDDs were, until not too long ago, seen as the premier option for escaping price hikes as SSDs began being affected by the ongoing global RAM shortage.

The problem is that these price hikes are starting to catch up to hard drives as well. ...

The problem now, however, is that hard drives are currently experiencing their own massive supply crisis. The exact same artificial intelligence boom that caused the memory shortage is simultaneously driving an unprecedented surge in demand for high-capacity hard drives within hyperscale data centers. While artificial intelligence operations require blazing-fast memory for active processing, the underlying foundation of these large language models relies on storing tens of thousands of petabytes of training data, images, and video.

SSDs are far too expensive for this bulk archiving, meaning the world's largest cloud service providers and artificial intelligence laboratories are aggressively buying up every available hard drive on the market. The situation has reached such an extreme that major storage manufacturers like Western Digital have publicly confirmed their entire hard drive production capacity is completely sold out for the entirety of calendar 2026. Data center giants have even locked in firm purchase orders for hard drives extending well into 2027 and 2028, effectively draining the supply pool for everyone else. ...