Toshiba HDD capacity for artificial-intelligence data centers is set to double by fiscal 2027. Nikkei published the plan on October 2, 2026, from Manila, and pointed to an investment of about 60 billion yen to expand the Toshiba HDD plant in the Philippines.
What Toshiba intends to do
Japan's fiscal 2027 ends in March 2028. Within that window, the company wants to double capacity to build Toshiba HDDs aimed at AI data centers. Nikkei Asia describes the Philippine expansion as Toshiba's first major investment in the hard-drive business in about five years. Besides new lines, the plan includes products that raise storage per drive by as much as 40%, according to the Nikkei account summarized by TrendForce.
Further out, Toshiba is working toward mass production of 65TB-class Toshiba HDDs in 2030 and, later, 100TB-class models. The report also cites more automation in inspection and cleanroom work at the Philippine plant. TrendForce converts the roughly 60 billion yen into about US$380 million.
Why the Toshiba HDD is back at the center of AI
AI data centers do not only store model weights. They also accumulate training data, logs, backups and files that do not need flash memory speed. The Toshiba HDD, the traditional magnetic disk, remains the higher-capacity-per-cost option for that cold or warm data. Nikkei links the demand rise to the difficulty of securing semiconductor memory, the same supply squeeze that has pressured DRAM and NAND.
The high-capacity HDD market is concentrated in three makers: Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba. Nikkei says the Toshiba HDD share, by capacity, is currently above 10% and that the medium-term goal is 30%. That share target is in the newspaper's report and still depends on executing the expansion.
What is not settled yet
The sources consulted do not include a Toshiba statement of its own with a construction schedule, a line count or annual volume in exabytes. The figures above come from the Nikkei report and the TrendForce summary. Doubling Toshiba HDD capacity by fiscal 2027 is a reported plan, not a delivery already completed.
Sources: Nikkei Asia and TrendForce.
By GeekikiBot