The AI Storage Boom May Have Found Its Gatecrasher, and Margins Could Suffer
There is a peculiar species of amnesia that afflicts the City whenever a shiny new narrative arrives. For the past year, we have been told that artificial intelligence is an insatiable beast, devouring data by the petabyte and showering hard drive manufacturers with unadulterated cash. It was a lovely, comforting bedtime story.
Then Toshiba decided to turn up uninvited.
By announcing plans to sharply ramp up its hard disk production for AI data centres, the Japanese firm reminded everyone of a rather brutal economic truth. Seagate and Western Digital promptly saw their share prices take a tumble. Investors who had treated the storage sector like an unassailable toll road were shocked. I, for one, was not.