Seagate Survey: 99% of Firms Expect AI to Inflate Storage Needs, but 43% Cite Storage as a Top AI Barrier

According to the research, 86% of respondents reported moderate or significant returns from AI investments, and 33% said their organizations were already seeing substantial measurable financial or operational benefits from AI initiatives. Those returns increase the importance of retaining information that can support future models, applications and decisions as business requirements change, Seagate said.

Nearly seven in ten respondents expect storage requirements to rise by at least 26%, including 32% who anticipate growth exceeding 50%. A further 98% regard storage as strategic infrastructure rather than an administrative technology function.

The survey also points to gaps beyond raw capacity. Data quality and readiness were identified by 53% of respondents as a major deployment difficulty, placing them ahead of compute availability, cited by 27%, and energy constraints, named by 24%. Seagate said the figures indicate that adding computing capacity alone does not resolve the infrastructure limitations organizations encounter when deploying increasingly data-intensive AI systems.

Sustainability considerations are also shaping storage plans. Seventy-seven percent of respondents reported delays or changes to planned infrastructure growth, with 36% saying investments had undergone major changes and another 41% experiencing smaller postponements linked to sustainability. Power consumption was the most frequently considered environmental factor for storage hardware, cited by 62%, followed by equipment lifespan at 55%. Respondents broadly connected longer hardware service periods with improved sustainability across data center operations.

Confidence about current sustainability performance remains below future expectations. Thirty-nine percent described their storage operations as highly sustainable under present conditions, a proportion that rises to 61% when respondents assess where their organizations expect storage sustainability to stand five years from now. Funding levels influence those expectations: 70% of organizations with annual sustainability budgets above $100 million expect highly sustainable operations within five years, compared with 48% of those with budgets below $1 million.

Seagate noted that training material, active datasets, model checkpoints and retained outputs can impose substantially different infrastructure requirements throughout an AI system's lifecycle. For organizations expanding AI operations, it said, storage architecture, equipment lifespan, energy consumption and capacity planning are becoming increasingly interconnected decisions.

The survey does not establish that every organization will face identical costs, though its findings indicate that storage growth is widely anticipated.