The global storage shortage is a thing, and things are about to get even worse, as reported by Tech 4 Gamers.
The rise of AI has led to a shortage of DRAM and NAND chips worldwide, and hard drives are equally affected. In fact, hard drive supply shortage worsened in Q2 2026, with the trade prices rising 10% quarter-over-quarter. This increase is reported to be significantly higher than in previous years, and can be attributed directly to AI data centres sprawling across the world.
Consumer-level 1TB and 2TB HDDs remain difficult to obtain, while high-capacity nearline drives are seeing record demand due to their use by hyperscale cloud providers.
So why is this happening? AI data centres need to store large amounts of data, images, videos, and other resources to run their cloud models. This amount of data requires many storage drives, and hard drives are better suited than SSDs for this purpose.
Western Digital and Seagate has already confirmed that their entire 2026 hard drive capacity is essentially sold out to AI data centres. As a result, prices have surged nearly 50% over the past 6 months or so. And this has a big effect on consumer drives as well.
So, the hard drive shortage is getting worse, with no realistic end in sight. According to industry analysts, we can expect things to improve sometime in 2027.