Businesses leaders across 15 industry sectors and 10 countries expect that adoption of AI applications will generate unprecedented volumes of data, driving a boom in demand for data storage, in particular cloud-based storage, according to a Recon Analytics survey commissioned by Seagate Technology.

With hard drives delivering scalability relative to terabyte-per-dollar cost efficiencies, cloud service providers rely on hard drivers to store mass quantities of data.

Recently, analyst firm IDC estimated that 89% of data stored by leading cloud service providers is stores on hard drives.

Now, according to this Recon Analytics study, nearly two-thirds of respondents (61%) from companies that use cloud as their leading storage medium expect their cloud-based storage to grow by more than 100% over the next three years.

“The survey results generally point to a coming surge in demand for data storage, with hard drives emerging as the clear winner,” remarked Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst of Recon Analytics.

“When you consider that the business leaders we surveyed intend to store more and more of this AI-driven data in the cloud, it appears that cloud services are well-positioned to ride a second growth wave.”

With nearly three in four (72%) of business leaders surveyed saying that their business uses AI today, this could lead cloud usage to skyrocket overall.

And the importance of this is not lost on leaders, as those surveyed ranked storage as the second most important component of AI infrastructure, only beat by security.

Of those businesses which have adopted AI technology, 90% believe longer data retention improves the quality of AI outcomes.

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Further, the vast majority (88%) of respondents who use AI today believe that adoption of trustworthy AI requires an increased need to store more data for longer periods of time.

This all points to a trend toward organisations retaining data for longer periods of time to ensure they have the data integrity needed to optimally train AI models. In order to AI innovation and adoption to continue, AI results and outcomes need to become increasingly accurate.

“Trustworthy AI is really the key to enabling mainstream adoption of AI,” said BS Teh, Chief Commercial Officer of Seagate.

“With the vast majority of survey respondents saying they need to store data for longer periods of time to improve quality outcomes of AI, we’re focused on areal density innovation needed to increase storage capacity for each platter in our HAMR-based hard drives. We have a clear pathway to more than double per-platter storage capacity over the next few years.”