Trends shaping intelligent infrastructure

Having walked the show floor three times at Supercomputing 2025 in St. Louis, I can say the mood was excitement about the birth and continued growth of AI.

Representing the Seagate Office of the CTO, my job at the event was to expand the horizon of our technology to a wider audience and meet with key customers, partners and vendors.

Valuable conversations often started with someone saying to me “here’s what you guys are missing” and ended with “give me that on the next hard drive.”

Vendors of all sizes were present on the show floor. And the innovation on display from the biggest hyperscalers to the smallest component vendors was impressive. It was also very clear that data remains foundational and critical up and down the full tech stack.

I also spent time sharing our innovations in how to attach hard drives not only in the cloud but also as tier zero into an AI infrastructure. Several discussions covered AI and growing data sets at universities and government labs. In these, our new JBOD and proof-of-concept NVMe over Fabrics EBOD (Ethernet Bunch of Drives) followed by eventual NVMe hard drives with GPUDirect enablement drew strong interest.

Industry trends: From supercomputers to hyperscale data centers

The Supercomputing show centers around key technology innovations that are solving critical problems in high-performance computing. Hyperscale data centers tend to follow the best of that innovation, but on a wider scale in what is in effect the equivalent of numerous supercomputers.

Liquid cooling comes of age

One prominent example featured at the conference is liquid rather than air cooling for infrastructure. It’s rapidly maturing, and already in use to control the intense heat in data centers.

Liquid cooling is more efficient than air cooling. It’s about cold plates that move heat away from silicon, chilled water and massive plumbing in the data center. 

Another side benefit of liquid cooling is not having fans blowing on hard drives. Any sound wave movement, any vibration, could cause errors on a drive.

We’ve already worked very hard on reducing vibration from adjacent drives. But what we haven't been able to 100% solve is the fan noise in the systems that house the drives.

While it wasn’t designed for storage, liquid cooling goes a long way toward solving this problem. This is a case of innovation outside the drive complementing our innovation inside the drive.

Leveraging the liquid cooling infrastructure for hard drives means no more fans and no more harmful acoustic resonance frequency vibrations and lower constant drive temperatures, which enable us to deliver more capacity per disk, better performance, less error and longer product life.

Edge appliances for AI

Another focus at SC25 was appliances designed for deployment at the edge. These support the larger trend we’re seeing of workloads moving out of the cloud to on-premises and the edge.

Think of these appliances as GPUs, CPUs, flash and hard drives running AI infrastructure out of one AI-optimized box.

Take, for example, a ship in the ocean using sonar to look for oil and gas. It might collect data in an edge appliance for a whole month and then process the data before sending what’s promising back to the data center.

Or look at a bunch of EVs with autonomous driving or auto-pilot assistance driving around town and each accumulating probably multiple terabytes of data every day. Instead of uploading these terabytes from each car to their main data center, the car company downloads the data from all these vehicles on our drives and does the processing on the edge to remove repetitive and irrelevant information.

Value of data

Those ships and vehicles — and their cameras, sensors and on-board computers — generate massive amounts of data. But as is also true at a research institution or an enterprise, the data collected is only valuable when it is put to work. And it’s only put to work when stored and accessible. 

At Seagate, we don’t directly make driving safer and cars more reliable. But we do invest and innovate to make these — and countless other benefits — possible through advances in data storage. 

Tomorrow's data demands require the most comprehensive storage solutions. Learn more about our next-generation edge enterprise storage today.