Microsoft To Spend $80B On Data Centers In Its Current Fiscal Year

Last year, they spent $50B on data centers.

Meta, Google and Amazon are also expected to spend handsomely on data centers as well. Musk is trying to catch up as well.

The massive AI-enabled server farms require lots of power, which prompted Microsoft to strike a deal to reopen a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, the site of a notorious partial meltdown in 1979. Amazon and Google have also signed nuclear power agreements.

This is just US companies. China is also trying to build massive data centers, but is somewhat stunted by lack of advanced chipsets.

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Tastyfrzz · 61-69, M

One small problem. The hard drive industry has been obliterated by years of no sales and worn out equipment. A lot of which can no longer be repaired or retooled as the headcount has been so drastically reduced and the parts are no longer on the shelf.
Solid state drives are in no better condition.

Northwest · M

@Tastyfrzz Not sure what you mean. Storage gets rotated out frequently.

Tastyfrzz · 61-69, M

@Northwest The orders for hard drives have been very small for the last three years. The manufacturing engineering group at Seagate was sold off to Luminar and the MDW engineering group has all retired.

Northwest · M

@Tastyfrzz From the August 2024 Digital Storage Technology Newsletter.

Total HDD shipments in C1Q 2024 were up about 1.0% compared with C1Q 2024 (30.3M versus 29.7M). Total exabytes shipped in C2Q 2024 were up about 10.6% from C1Q 2024, driven by greater sales of mass storage HDDs, such as nearline drives. HDD revenues ($4.51B) were up about 14.6% from the prior quarter. This quarter continued the upward trend in unit and exabyte shipments as well as revenues that started two quarters ago. Other memory and storage products have also recovered.

Seagate said their HDD revenue was $1.727B in the quarter with Mass Capacity HDDs accounting for 83% of this revenue. 79% of the company’s product was sold directly to OEMs (up from 75% in the prior quarter). Total storage capacity shipped was 114.2EB with 103.9EB for Mass Capacity and 8.3TB for Nearline HDDs, the balance of 10.3EB was shipped for legacy applications. The average HDD capacity was 9.3TB with Mass Capacity average capacity at 12.6TB and legacy average capacity at 2.5TB. The company shipped about 12.3M units in the quarter with an ASP of $140.9.

The storage business is expected to increase by more than 50% on yearly basis for the foreseeable future.

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