AI Triggers Hard‑Drive Shortage

AI training datasets, checkpoints, and logs are flooding the 'warm storage' tier, pushing high‑capacity HDD lead times past 52 weeks and forcing price hikes across product lines. With no major HDD capacity expansions in a decade, cloud providers are testing costlier QLC SSDs as stopgaps. — AI’s storage bottleneck will raise cloud costs and reconfigure data‑center architectures, showing that AI’s growth is constrained by more than GPUs.