Dave Mosley

Dave Mosley has served as CEO of Seagate Technology since 2017, navigating the hard disk drive industry through one of its most challenging and transformative periods. Seagate is one of only two remaining HDD manufacturers globally (alongside Western Digital), with the industry having consolidated from over a dozen players through decades of M&A and competitive exits. The HDD market has undergone a fundamental shift: consumer and PC applications have largely moved to solid-state drives (SSDs), but the enterprise/cloud data center market has actually grown its HDD demand because the cost-per-terabyte advantage of HDDs over SSDs remains substantial — approximately 5-8x cheaper per unit of storage. As hyperscale data centers operated by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta require massive amounts of "nearline" storage for data that doesn't need SSD speed, HDD demand from these customers has become the dominant revenue driver. Mosley's most consequential strategic bet has been HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology, which uses a tiny laser on the read/write head to momentarily heat the disk surface, allowing data to be written at much higher densities than conventional magnetic recording. HAMR-based drives promise 30+ terabyte capacities (compared to ~20TB for current conventional technology), with a roadmap to 50TB and beyond. Seagate has begun shipping HAMR drives commercially. Key stock drivers include data center storage demand, HAMR technology adoption pace, cloud customer capex cycles, pricing dynamics in the HDD duopoly, and Seagate's capital allocation (the company maintains a generous dividend and buyback program).