(Yicai) Dec. 4 -- Although China’s hard drive storage industry is under pressure from both the technological barriers set by international giants and fierce price wars at home, rapid changes in demand fueled by artificial intelligence applications are also creating opportunities for Chinese firms to lead globally, the senior vice president of Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies told Yicai in a recent interview.

"The Chinese market consumes nearly CNY60 billion (USD8.3 billion) worth of hard disk drives every year,” said Zhou Yuefeng, who is also chief executive officer of the Shenzhen-based firm’s cloud computing arm Huawei Cloud and president of its data storage product line. However, domestic companies still lack core technologies and adequate production capacity, leaving China at a disadvantage whenever global supply chains fluctuate.

"The lack of core technologies puts China's hard drive storage sector on the back foot in the global supply chain. Breakthroughs are needed in materials, manufacturing equipment and production processes," Zhou said.

However, the AI era is ushering in new opportunities, Zhou said. Rising investment in AI data infrastructure and the growing importance of long-term data preservation are driving rapid, sustained growth in demand for hard drives. This creates opportunities for Chinese storage companies to catch up with their overseas counterparts.

"In the past, information technology systems mainly required fast processors. But in the AI era, systems must also handle massive data processing and transmission volumes," Zhou said. "Even the world’s top tech companies are working to boost their ability to process huge data sets in parallel. High-end storage products with high bandwidth will be a critical breakthrough point for newcomers in the industry looking to catch up.”

"A smart person not only needs to think quickly but must also have an excellent memory. Likewise, storage systems in the AI era must work as a collaborative system combining data storage with processing power," he added.

Smart Data Platforms

Chinese IT firms should pay more attention to and invest in the storage sector, Zhou said. In his view, future hard drives will no longer merely serve as "data warehouses,” but will evolve into intelligent data platforms equipped with AI capabilities.

Huawei will launch a physical AI data platform early next year, Zhou said. This new storage device will integrate AI features such as inference acceleration and knowledge-base generation.

"Future storage devices must offer high reliability and high availability, and should be able to directly support AI training and inference," Zhou said. Chinese storage companies should speed up AI-oriented innovation, overcome key technologies and build a complete industrial chain.

China still has a way to go before it can achieve 'storage independence,' Zhou said. Companies across the industrial chain need to join forces to accelerate technological innovation and evolution in order to reach that goal as soon as possible.

"With the transition from digitization to intelligence, data is becoming even more important and the hard drive storage market will only keep expanding," he said.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor