Toshiba plans to double the production capacity of hard disk drives for artificial intelligence data centers by the fiscal year 2027 to meet the growing demand for high-capacity storage resulting from the infrastructure construction of AI.

It is reported that the company will invest approximately 60 billion yen, which is about 380 million US dollars, to expand the production facilities of HDD located in the Philippines. This will be Toshiba's first major investment related to hard drives in about five years.

Toshiba is currently listed alongside Western Digital and Seagate as one of the three major HDD manufacturers in the world. The company hopes to increase its global market share, calculated based on storage capacity, through this expansion, with a medium-term goal of raising it from the current level just over 10% to 30%.

This expansion not only includes increasing the production capacity of existing products but also involves introducing new production lines for manufacturing hard drive products with a maximum single-disc capacity increase of about 40%.

In terms of product roadmap, Toshiba plans to achieve mass production of 65TB級 HDD around 2030 and further advance towards 100TB級 products.

This reflects that the demand for storage infrastructure in the AI data center is shifting from GPU and high-bandwidth memory to larger-capacity back-end storage. As the volume of data generated by the training and inference of generative AI models continues to increase, data centers not only need more powerful computing capabilities but also cheaper solutions for large-scale data storage.

Compared to SSD, HDD does not have an advantage in access speed, but it has a lower cost per unit of storage capacity. Therefore, it still has a clear advantage in scenarios where it is necessary to store large amounts of data over a long period of time.

Especially in the AI data center, a large amount of training data, logs, backups, and cold data do not always require the use of high-performance flash memory; therefore, high-capacity HDD still has strong cost competitiveness.

This is also an important background for Toshiba's renewed large-scale investment in the production capacity of HDD.

If the expansion is carried out as planned, Toshiba not only hopes to capitalize on the growing storage demand in the AI data centers but also attempts to improve its competitive position through products with higher capacities.

Therefore, the core of this investment of 60 billion yen is not simply an expansion of the traditional hard drive business, but rather the strategic value of HDD for high-capacity storage is being re-emphasized through the construction of AI infrastructure. Toshiba hopes to take advantage of this demand cycle to significantly increase its market share from the current slightly over 10% to 30%.