The AI industry’s focus is shifting from training models to deploying them, creating a surge in high-performance “inference” services. This has triggered a storage problem, as traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) can’t keep up with demand.
According to TrendForce, major cloud providers are now scrambling for alternatives, fueling the rise of “Nearline SSDs”—a new category of storage built specifically for AI inference tasks. This intense demand is expected to last through 2027. However, the push to produce these specialized drives is predicted to tighten the supply of general-purpose Enterprise SSDs by 2026, signaling upcoming challenges for the data storage market.
