Total HDD shipments in C1Q 2024 were up about 1.0% compared with C1Q 2024 . Total exabytes shipped in C2Q 2024 were up about 10.6% from C1Q 2024, driven by greater sales of mass storage HDDs, such as nearline drives. HDD revenues were up about 14.6% from the prior quarter. This quarter continued the upward trend in unit and exabyte shipments as well as revenues that started two quarters ago. Other memory and storage products have also recovered.
Dave Mosley of Seagate said that. “…we are seeing strong nearline cloud demand growth from customers globally. Fourth quarter nearline cloud revenue more than doubled from the year ago period, and we expect growth to continue in fiscal 2025. We attribute the underlying demand drivers to an increase from both traditional cloud computing workloads, as well as new AI-related deployments.
In the enterprise OEM markets, we observed a gradual improvement in demand for the second consecutive quarter; and continue to project stronger growth in the second half of the calendar year, driven by both modest improvement in traditional server unit demand and increased exabyte content.” …Turning now to our outlook, we expect mass capacity revenue to trend higher in September quarter and more than offset lower sales into the legacy markets. We continue to see demand growth from global cloud customers as well as a modest improvement in the nearline enterprise market.”
The layers focus race is behind us. The emphasis is now shifting toward strategically timing the economic introduction of new longer-lasting nodes. Innovation now means enhancing power efficiency, performance, and capacity within these nodes, while capital decisions increasingly prioritize opportunities for margin expansion and revenue growth.