Toshiba plans $380M investment to double AI data center HDD capacity by FY2027

Toshiba is putting approximately 60 billion yen, or about $380 million, into expanding its hard disk drive manufacturing in the Philippines. The goal is to double production capacity for drives aimed at AI data centers by fiscal year 2027, which ends in March 2028. The move marks Toshiba’s first major HDD investment in five years. It also comes with a long-range roadmap: mass production of 65TB-class drives by 2030, with models above 100TB planned after that. What Toshiba is actually building The expansion centers on Toshiba’s facility in the Philippines. New production lines there are designed to turn out drives with up to 40% more storage capacity per unit. Automation is the other major piece of the plan. Toshiba is upgrading inspection and cleanroom processes, and the company expects the changes to cut workforce needs by around 40%. On the technology side, Toshiba is leaning on two techniques to push capacity higher. The first is Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording, or MAMR, and the second is 12-disk stacking. Think of MAMR as giving the drive’s write head a small energy boost. A burst of microwave energy helps it record data onto smaller, more tightly packed magnetic regions....