Drives bigger data storage needs, Western Digital study

Western Digital, citing research with IDC, says AI is driving significant increases in enterprise data storage needs. A survey of 763 IT and business decision-makers across seven countries found 94.7% reported that AI and generative AI adoption increased the amount of data stored over the past 12 months. About 61% said data volumes grew by 25% or more, and 74% expect similar growth over the next three years. Data lakes are a major pressure point: 85.4% saw growth, with AI-generated data—including synthetic data, inference outputs and model logs—identified by 59.4% as the main reason. The study also shows more cold-tier archive data is being brought online for AI workloads.