India, Sept. 15 -- TrendForce's latest investigations reveal that the massive data volumes generated by AI are straining the global infrastructure of data center storage. Nearline HDDs, traditionally the backbone of large-scale data storage, are now facing severe supply shortages, pushing high-performance yet higher-cost SSDs into the market spotlight. In particular, shipments of high-capacity QLC SSDs could see explosive growth in 2026.

In the traditional tiered storage architecture of data centers, HDDs have long dominated cold data storage thanks to their exceptionally low cost per gigabyte. Cold data typically includes backup files and historical records-datasets that are rarely accessed but must be archived long-term. With the rapid...