Seagate report: 99% of IT leaders expect AI to lift storage demand
Seagate Technology has published its inaugural 2026 Data Infrastructure Readiness Report, drawing on a survey of 2,712 enterprise technology decision-makers across seven markets conducted by Recon Analytics between May and June 2026. The research, covering the US, China, India, the UK, Germany, France and Japan, finds near-universal expectation that AI will drive significant storage growth, yet reveals a substantial preparedness gap among those tasked with meeting that demand.
Almost all respondents (99%) expect AI to increase their organisation's storage requirements over the next three years, with roughly one in three anticipating growth exceeding 50%. Despite that consensus, only 38% of IT leaders say their organisations are fully prepared for the long-term data demands that AI will impose.
Infrastructure focus shifts beyond compute
The report's most striking finding may be the relative ranking of challenges. Data quality and readiness topped the list at 53%, followed by storage infrastructure at 43%. Both ranked ahead of compute availability (27%) and energy constraints (24%), suggesting enterprise AI strategy is broadening its focus beyond GPU and processor procurement to encompass the data foundations that feed those systems.
More than three-quarters of respondents (76%) place data-centre investment among their organisation's top three infrastructure priorities, with one in five naming it the single highest investment priority. Leading barriers to greater preparedness include AI strategy maturity (16%), budget and resources (14%), and data governance (14%).
Melyssa Banda, senior vice president of Edge Storage Business at Seagate, framed the shift in terms of long-term asset management. "As data volumes grow, so does the value organisations can derive from the data," she said. "Sustainable Scaling is about making those infrastructure decisions more efficient, more durable and more connected to long-term data value."
Seagate uses the term "Sustainable Scaling" to describe an approach it says balances capacity expansion with improved infrastructure efficiency and lifecycle planning, though it is worth noting the concept is a Seagate marketing framework rather than an independent industry standard.
Sustainability becomes a planning variable
Sustainability pressures are also shaping infrastructure decisions in ways that go beyond compliance. Nearly eight in ten organisations (77%) have either delayed or restructured AI infrastructure expansion because of sustainability or energy concerns, and 36% say their plans have been significantly restructured. AI-driven energy consumption (52%) and carbon emissions (51%) rank as the leading environmental concerns among respondents.
Nearly all organisations (97%) agree that extending infrastructure lifecycles improves sustainability, and 94% expect their storage operations to become more sustainable within five years.
These figures reflect a broader tension playing out across the data-centre sector. Power-constrained hyperscale operators and enterprise IT teams are under pressure to justify the energy footprint of expanding AI workloads. Hard-disk drive vendors including Seagate, and its primary competitor Western Digital, have made energy efficiency and aerial density improvements central to their product roadmaps as a way to position spinning media as cost-effective for the cold and warm storage tiers that AI training datasets typically require.
The preparedness gap the report identifies is commercially relevant for Seagate: organisations that recognise they are behind on storage infrastructure readiness represent a near-term sales opportunity for high-capacity drives and related solutions. Readers should weight the findings accordingly, while noting that the underlying methodology (a commissioned survey of 2,712 decision-makers across seven economies) is at least transparent in scope and geography. Seagate says the full report is available on its website.