Seagate Technology posted fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $3.629 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $5.71, beating analyst expectations as cloud and data center customers ramped up spending on high-capacity hard drives for artificial intelligence workloads. The company also issued a stronger-than-expected forecast for the current quarter, sending shares up about 6% in after-hours trading on July 28.
AI demand fuels storage growth
Management pointed to robust demand from cloud providers and enterprise data centers, where AI training, inference, and log storage are driving a surge in data generation. “AI workloads don’t just need GPUs — they need massive amounts of cost-effective storage for the data those GPUs produce,” the company said in its earnings release. Seagate expects that trend to continue, guiding fiscal first-quarter FY2027 revenue of approximately $4.10 billion (plus or minus $100 million) and non-GAAP EPS of $7.30 (plus or minus $0.20).
Mozaic platform and HAMR technology
Seagate highlighted its Mozaic platform, which uses heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to increase capacity per drive while reducing power consumption and physical footprint. The company said the platform is gaining traction with hyperscale customers who need to store petabytes of data without expanding their data-center floorspace. HAMR technology allows Seagate to push areal density beyond conventional limits, making it a key differentiator in the mass-capacity storage market.
Financial strength and shareholder returns
Seagate generated $1.118 billion in free cash flow during the quarter, allowing it to retire $302 million of debt and return $283 million to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. The balance sheet improvement comes as the company navigates a cyclical recovery in the hard-drive market, which has been boosted by AI-related demand. Wells Fargo upgraded Seagate to Overweight on July 10, citing the structural shift toward high-capacity drives.
Seagate will report its fiscal first-quarter results in late October. Investors will be watching whether the company can sustain its growth trajectory as AI demand continues to evolve.
