Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said on May 18, 2026, that increasing the capacity of individual hard drives was the company’s preferred approach to meeting storage demand. Diverting teams to build factories or bring new machines online would take too long and slow technology improvements, he said.
Seagate shares closed more than 6% lower that day. Shares of Micron, SanDisk and Western Digital also declined.
Speaking at JPMorgan’s Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Mosley said customers were seeking more total storage capacity, measured in exabytes. He argued that technology transitions offered Seagate the best way to increase that output.
“If we took the teams off and started building new factories or bringing up new machines, it would just take too long,” Mosley said.
He described a planned progression from 3 TB per platter to 4 TB and then 5 TB in successive years. Increasing hard-drive capacity was central to the company’s approach to supplying more storage.
Long production cycles shape customer commitments
Mosley said wafers used to manufacture recording heads could take more than nine months to produce, with the drives themselves taking roughly another quarter. Those production cycles gave Seagate visibility into output about a year ahead, he said.
Build-to-order commitments were locked in for four or five quarters, Mosley said. He described demand as significantly higher than the company’s forecasts and said Seagate had visibility beyond the committed period, although orders that far ahead were not locked in.
He distinguished constraints in critical components from relative flexibility in final drive production. Expanding manufacturing required coordination across Seagate’s operations and suppliers, he said. The company was adding tools within existing facilities, primarily to support technology transitions rather than simply increase production capacity.
Seagate links its strategy to AI demand
In Seagate’s fiscal third-quarter 2026 results, released on April 28, Mosley said the company believed AI applications would amplify data creation and support sustained storage demand. He described increasing recording density as the basis of Seagate’s strategy for delivering higher-capacity storage.
