Western Digital outlined its scalable AI storage strategy to address massive AI-driven data growth demands at the AI Infrastructure Summit.

As AI moves from experimentation to production deployment, organizations confront a fundamental infrastructure reality: while compute cycles are temporary, the data AI creates accumulates indefinitely. As that data compounds, the ability to store, manage and access it economically is becoming critical for long-term AI success.

At the AI Infrastructure Summit in Santa Clara, California (September 15–17), Tim Rausch, Senior Vice President of HDD Development at Western Digital, will discuss how AI is reshaping infrastructure requirements and why economically scalable capacity is emerging as a foundational element of the AI era.

Rausch's session builds on findings from a recently released IDC white paper sponsored by Western Digital, "Built for Scale: The Enduring Role of HDDs in the AI Era." The research found that 61% of surveyed organizations experienced data growth of 25% or more over the past year due to AI. Over the next three years, 74% expect data volumes to grow 25% or more, and 85.4% of organizations reported growth in data lake volumes over the past 12 months.

In his keynote on September 16 at 3:50 p.m. on the Main Stage, Rausch will share Western Digital's vision for helping customers manage AI's growing data footprint while balancing capacity, performance, power efficiency and economics at scale. He will also discuss innovations designed to support the next generation of AI infrastructure as organizations seek to retain more data, derive more value from it and scale AI with confidence.

Western Digital will showcase its enterprise storage portfolio at booth 605, where demonstrations will highlight how the company is helping hyperscalers, cloud service providers, neo clouds and data center customers achieve the capacity, efficiency and economics required for AI infrastructure at scale.