Cloud storage growth set to skyrocket as AI drives data retention needs

The rise of AI means more cloud storage is necessary – and it may even need to double, offering a big boost to cloud services.

That's according to a survey by Seagate and Recon Analytics, which asked business leaders around the world how they believe AI will impact their company's IT.

The survey found that 61% of respondents who use cloud storage now predict their storage needs will increase by 100% over the next three years. Similarly, respondents revealed that the cloud was the default for data storage for AI projects, with two-thirds of data stored in the cloud versus in-house.

"When you consider that the business leaders we surveyed intend to store more and more of this AI-driven data in the cloud, it appears that cloud services are well-positioned to ride a second growth wave," said Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst of Recon Analytics.

That's largely down to longer retention times, the Seagate report said, with 90% of respondents who are already using AI believing that holding onto data longer helps improve AI outcomes.

"As AI use cases and adoption becomes more pervasive, Recon Analytics forecasts companies will see exponential growth in their storage requirements," the report says.

"This will become even more evident when businesses move from their early AI trialing phase to being active AI users. Training LLMs, data replication, and longer data retention periods, all key elements of an AI strategy, will require increased storage investments to be successful."

The survey results echo previous research from Hitachi Vantara, which also predicted data storage capacity requirements more than doubling over the next few years.

Analysis from the firm found the average large organization currently holds 150 petabytes of data, and that will top 300PB by the end of next year — potentially sparking an increase in storage investment as companies race to boost capacity.

More data for trustworthy AI

Beyond that, almost as many Seagate survey respondents who use AI said that the adoption of trustworthy AI — which is an AI development framework that puts safety and transparency at the forefront — requires more data to be held for longer periods of time.

"Trustworthy AI is really the key to enabling mainstream adoption of AI," said BS Teh, Chief Commercial Officer of Seagate.

"With the vast majority of survey respondents saying they need to store data for longer periods of time to improve quality outcomes of AI, we’re focused on areal density innovation needed to increase storage capacity for each platter in our HAMR-based hard drives. We have a clear pathway to more than double per-platter storage capacity over the next few years."

That echoes comments made by Peter Zhou, president of data storage product line at Huawei, who said last year that storage architectures needed innovation to keep up with AI workloads:

"Data is not just used for recording, data becomes an asset that machines can use to study [the world], it’s the source of their knowledge and can enable their ‘thinking’, and now the data storage industry has to be changed."

The Seagate report also found that storage was ranked as the second most important aspect of AI infrastructure after security.

"Compute and energy have been the hot topics of the AI conversation over the past few years, but storage and security are ranked higher when looking from the storage infrastructure buyer perspective," the report noted.