Nikkei reported that Sony will partner with Seagate to mass produce hard drives to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence.
Sony plans to start mass production of laser diodes for disc players in May and may invest about 5 billion yen ($33 million) in new production lines.
Laser diodes promise to double the capacity of hard drives and meet the insatiable demands of today's data centers. Sony begins cooperation with Seagate to produce laser diodes.
Seagate uses laser diodes in a 3.5-inch drive that can store 30TB of data, twice as much as conventional products.
Sony is investing in a factory in Miyagi Prefecture, north of Japan's main island, and a factory in Thailand to install new production lines.
The company's new technology is so precise that it can fire a laser beam at a narrow spot with an accuracy of one millionth of a millimeter.
Laser diodes allow a laser beam with a temperature of 400 degrees or more to illuminate the storage area on the surface of the hard drive.
This allows more information to be written to the same area of the hard drive, which increases the hard drive's ability to store data.
As more startups and companies practice generative AI, demand for data centers continues to rise.
German research firm Statista expects global data generation to reach 181 zettabytes in 2025 (1 zettabyte equals 10 trillion bytes), an increase of 90% from 2022.
Data centers require a lot of land and a lot of electricity, making it difficult for developers to build faster.
Sony's new hard drive technology helps meet both needs by storing twice as much data in the same area and reducing power requirements by approximately 40%.