Innovation spotlight: Seagate facility in Northern Ireland

Seagate has earmarked £100 million over five years to develop and manufacture hard disk drives capable of storing 60 terabytes (TB) of data, surpassing today’s top capacity of 36TB. The economic development agency Invest Northern Ireland has committed an additional £15 million toward this goal.

The site for this innovative effort: Seagate’s advanced facilities in Derry/Londonderry.

Seagate-Northern Ireland backstory: In a Los Angeles bar more than 30 years ago, Seagate executive Brendan Hegarty sat down for a pint with John Hume, a political leader from Northern Ireland.

Their conversation turned to a question that soon intrigued then-CEO Al Shugart – why not open a Seagate facility in Northern Ireland?

Shugart sent a senior vice president to scout out the location. He came back with a positive report. With that, the CEO quickly decided moving ahead was “the right thing to do.”  

In 1993, Seagate broke ground on the 20-acre plant in Derry/Londonderry. That green-field development has become “a cornerstone of Northern Ireland’s tech sector,” according to Kieran Donoghue, CEO of Invest Northern Ireland.

Skilled employees at smart factories there fabricate silicon wafers from which they make key components in hard disk drives – recording heads that read and write data on spinning platters. 

The team produces 25% of all the recording heads in the world. In other words, their work accounts for one in four of the hard drives that store more than 80% of all data in the cloud.

Pictured (L-R) Fergus O’Donnell, VP Wafer Operations NI, explaining the 100,000 thin film heads located on a wafer to First Minister Michelle O’Neill and Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly.

R&D at the site pioneered today’s most advanced hard drives: Seagate’s Mozaic™ product line. Mozaic incorporates next-generation heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. 

The technology HAMR replaces had reached its limits, capable of just incremental capacity bumps. For example, five years ago Seagate introduced an 18TB drive, up just 2TB from the previous high of 16TB.

HAMR is a breakthrough, packing significantly more data per disk. The result is a record-breaking capacity of 36TB per hard drive – and a path to much more.

Seagate is the first and only company offering HAMR drives. It launched the HAMR-based Mozaic 3+ platform in 2024 and has already shipped more than 1 million units. 

Inside the cleanroom of Seagate’s Derry/Londonderry fab, one of only five facilities worldwide that develop and manufacture the nano-photonic components of hard drives.

36TB drives soon won’t be enough. According to IDC Worldwide Hard Disk Drive 2024-2028 Forecast, demand for data center storage was 1.1 zettabytes (ZB) in 2024. It forecasts that volume more than doubling to 2.4ZB by 2028. Astronomical numbers like these characterize the new era of AI. 

The solution isn’t simply more hard drives. It’s hard drives with greater capacity and performance. In other words, innovate to make one drive – roughly speaking – do the work of two. 

That’s the point of the new £115 million investment. “With Invest Northern Ireland’s support, we’re accelerating the development of 60TB and beyond capacities, laying the foundation for demonstrating 100TB drives by 2030,” says Seagate’s CTO John Morris. 

It was still years before the Good Friday Agreement when Seagate opened shop in Northern Ireland. In that sense, the right thing to do was also a bold thing to do. 

But the move has paid off. Seagate’s expertise has helped build a thriving innovation ecosystem across the country. Collaboration with Queen’s University Belfast, Ulster University and industry partners is driving advancements in storage technology. Continuing progress also benefits from a strong local talent pipeline of engineers and scientists. 

Local economy benefits, too. Stepped-up investment will add more than 30 highly skilled new members to the company’s team of 1,500 employees in Northern Ireland.  

“The impact of the Northern Ireland factory goes beyond world leading on-site manufacturing – it provides valuable jobs and helps develop a skilled workforce right across Northern Ireland,” says Seagate’s Fergus O’Donnell, vice president wafer operations. 

“It is brilliant to see our employees’ grown-up children now start their careers with Seagate,” he says. 

“The investments we have made to promote STEM ensure our next generation have the opportunity to develop their careers working on world-leading-edge technology and operations, right on their doorstep.”