Digitalisation plays a crucial role in promoting global sustainability. By replacing physical materials – such as paper and construction resources – as well as the processes involved in producing and transporting them with digital alternatives, we move closer to a more sustainable world.
However, many overlook the fact that digital systems are not created from nothing. The infrastructure supporting modern technology relies heavily on resources, from the raw materials and rare metals required to build servers and networking equipment to the electricity needed to keep them running and cool.
As digital transformation accelerates, hyperscalers, cloud providers and big tech companies need to build data centres quickly enough to keep up with demand. The increasing consumption of resources highlights the urgent need for new technologies and strategies to ensure digitalisation delivers on its environmental potential.
Innovations in Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), which form the foundation of cloud storage and large-scale data systems, are helping data centres become more sustainable. Improvements in architecture, new technologies, disaggregation of storage and computing power, and initiatives focused on recycling and remanufacturing are all contributing to this progress. To meet sustainability objectives, data centre designers must adopt these advancements.
On a wider scale, industry-wide collaboration will ultimately be key to shaping a more sustainable future and setting the standard. Initiatives focused on refurbishment, recycling and HDD reuse will encourage best practice across the industry.
AI’s demand for data continues to rise
AI-scale data centres are becoming a significant driver of global energy consumption. Bloomberg projects that electricity use will increase fourfold to tenfold by 2030, raising their share of total electricity consumption from 2% today to over 20% within just five years.
A major factor behind this surge is AI. Since AI performance depends on vast amounts of data, it requires enormous storage capacity. Greater capacity leads to increased GPU processing and expanded data centre infrastructure. Even the human workforce needed to operate these AI-scale facilities adds to power usage through commuting, air conditioning, and lighting. According to Morgan Stanley, data centres are expected to generate 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions by 2030 – three times more than if AI were not in use.
Advancing sustainability goals with efficient HDDs
Higher-capacity, lower-cost per terabyte HDD solutions serve as the foundation of modern data lakes, which store the massive datasets required to train AI models. Consider applications like genomic sequencing, intelligent chatbots, and real-time financial fraud detection – each of these relies on petabytes of continuously ingesting, digesting, and outputting data. As AI-driven innovation advances, organisations must prioritise investment in high-capacity, energy-efficient HDDs to support more sustainable data centers.
Here are three ways next-generation HDDs can help organisations meet sustainability goals:
1. Advanced high-density architectures and efficiency capabilities
High-capacity HDDs underpin AI-driven cloud data lakes, so any effort to consolidate more capacity in the same form can make a significant impact on reducing data centre resource consumption. Technologies such as electronic energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR), shingled magnetic recording (SMR), and helium-sealed HDD enable greater storage density without increasing the physical footprint or power demands. This results in fewer servers and storage enclosures, lower cooling requirements, and reduced overall power consumption.
2. Disaggregation of storage and compute resources
Traditionally, organisations have scaled storage and computing resources together, doubling infrastructure footprints. However, by disaggregating storage from compute resources, companies can scale each component independently, avoiding over-provisioning. This approach improves total cost of ownership (TCO) whilst also reducing the number of physical units in data centres, ultimately lowering energy costs associated with networking, cooling, and rack space as fewer idle services are running, reducing overall power consumption.
Through disaggregation, compute and storage resources can also dynamically scale based on demand alone, reducing power wastage as a result.
3. Recycling and remanufacturing processes
A growing circular economy for HDDs is helping extend product lifespans, minimise e-waste, and recover valuable materials from retired drives. Sustainable manufacturing processes further improve HDD efficiency, ensuring AI applications maintain the storage capacity and performance they require within an environmentally responsible supply chain.
By implementing circular economy initiatives such as refurbishing old drives and recycling parts, manufacturers can ensure proper material recovery, reducing the need for new raw materials, reducing e-waste and resource depletion. Strategies such as these not only reduce environmental impact, but contribute to a more sustainable data centre ecosystem in its entirety.
Vision for the future
Digitalisation is essential for achieving long-term global sustainability goals, but the growing demand for digital infrastructure brings challenges related to manufacturing, energy consumption, and operational costs. HDD manufacturers are actively addressing these concerns by adopting more sustainable practices. Innovations such as high-density storage architectures, energy efficient HDD technologies and storage disaggregation are reducing the environmental impact of data centres themselves. As well as this, advanced recycling and remanufacturing processes are contributing to the circular economy of the data centre ecosystem. Embracing these sustainable technologies and strategies will play a crucial role in preserving our planet for future generations.
