Signal AI data centres revive hard disk drive demand, with world shipments up 28.1 percent in 2025

Summary

KISDI reports that Korea's HDD-related exports reached 27 million dollars in the first eleven months of 2025, still less than one percent of the 13.14 billion dollars in computer and peripheral exports but 28.6 percent higher than a year earlier. Citing Gartner, it estimates world HDD shipments at 23.15 billion dollars in 2025, up 28.1 percent. HDDs are slower and noisier than SSDs but cheaper per gigabyte, at an average selling price of 0.014 dollars against 0.08 dollars for SSDs in 2025, so they serve as the large data bank for backup and archiving of AI training and inference data. The world market is dominated by Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba, and Korea has no direct HDD manufacturer. World HDD shipments are projected to grow 8.3 percent a year between 2024 and 2029, slightly faster than SSDs at 6.4 percent.