Seagate: 99% of firms expect AI to lift storage demand

Seagate's inaugural Data Infrastructure Readiness Report finds only 38% of enterprise IT leaders feel fully prepared for AI's long-term storage demands.

By The Datatech Times Editorial Team AI level 2 of 5
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Seagate Technology has published its first Data Infrastructure Readiness Report, drawing on a survey of 2,712 enterprise technology decision-makers across seven markets to examine how organisations are preparing their data infrastructure for the next phase of AI deployment. The headline finding is stark: virtually every respondent (99%) expects AI to increase storage requirements over the next three years, yet only 38% believe they are fully prepared for those demands.

The research, conducted by Recon Analytics between May and June 2026 across the US, China, India, the UK, Germany, France and Japan, points to a widening gap between AI ambition and infrastructure readiness. Data quality and readiness (53%) and storage infrastructure (43%) rank as the leading challenges to deploying AI at scale, both ahead of compute availability (27%) and energy constraints (24%), a finding that will interest vendors and buyers who have focused investment disproportionately on GPU and accelerator procurement.

The readiness gap

Despite the preparedness shortfall, returns from AI are already visible. Nearly nine in ten organisations (86%) report moderate or significant ROI from AI investments, with one-third reporting significant measurable returns. Nearly all respondents (98%) agree that AI is transforming storage from a commodity cost line into strategic business infrastructure.

The barriers to greater readiness are partly organisational. AI strategy maturity (16%), budget and resource constraints (14%), and data management and governance (14%) are the leading factors holding back progress, suggesting that cultural and process gaps are as significant as hardware constraints. More than three-quarters of respondents (76%) rank data-centre investment among their top three infrastructure priorities, with one in five (20%) rating it their single highest.

Seagate frames its proposed response around a concept it calls Sustainable Scaling: growing AI capacity and business value while continuously improving infrastructure efficiency and long-term data value. "AI is reshaping the way organisations plan, build and operate infrastructure," said Melyssa Banda, senior vice president of Edge Storage Business at Seagate. "The companies that create lasting value from AI will be the ones that treat data infrastructure as a business strategy."

Sustainability enters the infrastructure calculus

The report also surfaces sustainability as an emerging constraint on AI infrastructure expansion. Nearly eight in ten organisations (77%) say they have delayed or restructured AI infrastructure expansion because of sustainability or energy concerns, with 36% having significantly restructured plans. AI-driven energy consumption (52%) and carbon emissions (51%) rank as the leading environmental concerns among respondents.

These figures align with a broader industry pattern. Hyperscale data-centre power demand has become a material constraint on AI rollout timelines across Europe and North America, with grid capacity, permitting delays and power-purchase agreement availability limiting how quickly operators can bring capacity online. The EU's Energy Efficiency Directive and the UK's forthcoming data-centre sustainability reporting obligations are adding regulatory pressure to what was previously a voluntary efficiency agenda.

The findings carry competitive implications for the storage hardware market. If enterprise buyers are shifting infrastructure investment priority from compute toward storage and data management, established vendors such as Seagate, Western Digital and Pure Storage stand to benefit, as do the growing tier of data-management software and governance platform vendors. The report is, however, self-commissioned research: Seagate has an evident commercial interest in research that elevates storage in the infrastructure priority stack, and the findings should be read in that context.

Seagate has not disclosed whether or when it will repeat the survey, but described the 2026 edition as its inaugural report, implying an annual cadence is planned.

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