Toshiba recently announced that it plans to double its HDD production capacity , targeting the AI data center demand by fiscal 2027. The company said that it will invest about 60 billion yen (about $380M) to expand its HDD plants in the Philippines, its first major drive-related investment in about five years.

Toshiba said that it aims to increase its market share by storage capacity from just over 10% to 30% over the medium term. The figure below shows the breakdown of market share by shipped capacity for Seagate, WD and Toshiba so far for 2026. Toshiba’s 2026 HDD revenue market share so far for 2026 is about 13%.

Seagate and Western Digital have reported no plans to increase their HDD manufacturing anytime soon during recent investor events. However, Seagate has announced that it is expanding its head production facilities by 3X . Seagate and WD have both reported that their 2026 production is sold out and that they have long-term agreements extending into 2027 and 2028. Seagate and WD have said that they will focus on increasing their storage capacity shipments and achieving good yields on HAMR technology rather than expanding their HDD manufacturing.

Toshiba said that the expansion will include new production lines for drives with up to 40% higher per-unit capacity and support Toshiba’s plans for mass production of 65 TB class HDDs by 2030, eventually targeting 100 TB class products.

Seagate and WD are shipping 40+ TB HDDs in 2026 with plans to increase HDD storage capacities up to 100 TB by 2030 (WD has said that they will do this using 14 platter drives by 2030).

So how could a 2X increase in unit production would give Toshiba a 30% total HDD capacity market share? Let’s look at some other numbers. Note that for 2025, the last year we had a reasonable estimate of in the past for the HDD unit shipments by the three manufacturers, we estimated that Toshiba had a 19%-unit shipment market share as shown below.

This was also true in 2024 with a 20%-unit shipment market share in 2023 and 2022. So, Toshiba seems to have shipped a higher percentage of lower capacity HDDs in recent years, compared to Seagate and Western Digital.

It would appear that much of the Toshiba investment, is as indicated, for making more higher capacity HDDs that have huge demand by data centers. If the company can increase its total unit production from 19% of the market to close to 40% (a 2X unit production increase) with higher capacity drives it could achieve its goal of 30% of the shipped capacity by the end of the decade.

If the new Toshiba manufacturing is open by 2027, we should expect some production later that year or in 2028. Overall, this would likely increase total HDD annual capacity shipments by roughly 20% more than today by the end of the decade. I have projected 125.9 M HDDs shipped in 2026, so that would give a bit over 151 M units shipped by the industry by 2030, assuming that Seagate and WD don’t increase their HDD unit production as well.

Toshiba’s plan to increase their HDD production 2X by 2027 breaks with Seagate and WD indications that they were making no such expansions. Toshiba’s plans could give them a 30% shipped capacity market share by the end of the decade.