Seagate Technology Holdings PLC Ordinary Shares (Ireland) The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2026

iPods and XBOXes and early PCs, and we had data center customers and everything else, but we really grew up in that PC revolution, started building very low-cost boxes for everybody to get on the internet for the first time.

Right. Now all the data, the mass capacity data we call it, is up in data centers.

The boxes that have really morphed, the whole supply chain has had to morph over the last 10 years to the point where 80% of the world's data is on a hard drive in the data center right now, and it's continuing to grow at leaps and bounds. Largely because as the technology has moved, these application spaces have moved, and if I think anything about AI right now, it's really the different applications have just exploded. It wasn't happening 10 years ago, but there's so many different fronts where you've got applications pulling data, creating data, sending it back down, and then wanting to do it as efficiently as you can.

That's what's exciting. Yeah. I'm excited about the opportunity, as you are.

I'm also amazed at how far the technology has come. You have photonics engineers, lasers. It's not your father's spinning disc anymore. I know we're going to get into that a little later, but it does just show how far it has moved. Some people might take for granted how much technology it takes to get on one of these single platters, and I'm amazed every time that I come back. So you and I have both been through some of all the major transitions out there in techno I guess, when we started. But, I was part of, I would say mini to mainframe was a little bit after me, but mainframe to client server, e-commerce, social media, the web, mobile. You talked a little bit about the iPod there. And there was a first wave of AI.

More of an edge play, in a way, object recognition. But here we are in this age of agentic AI. What is fundamentally different about this era that we're in compared to maybe all the other ones that I had discussed?

Yeah. I think software is being disrupted. A lot of people can speak more eloquently than I can about that. Not just software itself, but also the entire software ecosystem, the stack that is outside of most of the drives in the application spaces we see. We talk to a lot of cloud service providers. They have different applications. They are not all created equal, nor are their applications, but more and more what we're seeing is software that it's not lossy.

There's not a whole lot of handoffs as you get up to the application layer. People don't want to pay for that. They want to pay for actually data in the application. So I think you're seeing a stronger tie between the ultimate application, call it agentic application if you want, down through the software stack and into the hardware now.

It's actually more integrated. That's right.

Per se, less layers and less handoffs.

I think the cloud service providers have done a miraculous job at some of this architectural stuff, whether it's hardware architecture or software architecture. I think people are watching that and trying to duplicate that. It will ultimately come out to the edge as well.

Yeah. Most interesting one, I think, even related to data and storage is the compressing of the database layer, and even the embeddings layer, that fit inside of storage. We've seen a lot of startup companies and a lot of the incumbent storage companies pull that together. One of the biggest shifts we're hearing about, it was one thing to take advantage of structured data inside of an Oracle database or any type of relational database. But unstructured is an area of data that we really weren't able to exploit this year. Organizations really haven't taken advantage of that, and they've been rethinking their strategies to do this. What does the disconnect between how much data is actually available and I think just to be honest, the lack of use of it, how do you explain this disconnect between the two?

It's actually interesting because, like you said before, the applications are much faster now, enabled by silicon technologies that are making them really quick. Then you also have much more efficient algorithms being written to be able to extract data or create data or save data. From my perspective, down inside the storage layer, we've always been kind of subservient to the file systems and things above us. Now we're starting to see more what I'll call object stores.

Yeah. Where what's really happening at layers above us, in memory layers, say, is that you are having very fast transactions on metadata, then when you need that specific data underneath, you pull it up.