WD-sponsored IDC study says AI adoption drives compounding enterprise storage demand - WDC News | RalliesWD-sponsored IDC study says AI adoption drives compounding enterprise storage demand
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WDC• IDC study highlights rising AI-related storage demand
- Western Digital-backed IDC analysis flagged a structural rise in AI storage demand as data persists beyond compute cycles.
- Survey: 94.7% stored more data due to AI in the past 12 months; 74% expect volumes to rise 25%+ in three years.
- AI-generated data drove growth, with 59.4% citing synthetic data, inference outputs, model logs as top data-lake drivers.
- Retention is lengthening: 74.3% kept data longer; 75.9% pulled more archived data back online for AI workloads.
- Cost focus is intensifying, with 98.2% prioritizing TCO per terabyte; 74.6% of enterprise data sits in warm-to-cold tiers.