Seagate is on track to start qualification of its hard disk drives featuring 50TB-class capacities in late calendar 2027, with shipments to follow in 2028, the company announced this week. Demand for HDDs is so strong because of the rise of AI and continued strength of the cloud computing business that most drives are sold out through 2028 and negotiations about allocations for 2029 are ongoing.

"Mozaic 5, our 5+ terabyte per disk platform, remains on track for qualification shipments in late calendar 2027," said Dave Mosley, chief executive officer of Seagate, during the company's earnings call with financial analysts and investors.

Mozaic 5 is the company's 3^rd generation platform for commercial hard drives based on Seagate's heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology that succeeds Mozaic 3 and Mozaic 4. The Mozaic 5 platform enables the company to build platters with over 5TB capacity and consequently build 10-platter HDDs with over 50TB capacity featuring conventional magnetic recording (CMR) for clients seeking performance and versatility or shingled magnetic recording (SMR) for clients that need maximum capacity to maximize their storage density.

If Seagate preps to initiate 'qualification shipments' of its 50TB-class hard drives in late calendar 2027, then it means that by the time the HDDs have passed all the manufacturer's internal validations, including reliability and durability of heads and media, shock and vibration tests, and longevity tests among many others. It typically takes server OEMs about two to six months to qualify new HDDs for their offerings, whereas hyperscale cloud service providers usually qualify them for six to 12 months. In any case, it is safe to say that Seagate is on track to ship 50TB-class hard drives in calendar 2028 with significant volume ramp in 2029.

These 50TB-class HDDs will come to market just in time to meet exabyte demand from the AI and cloud sectors. Most of Seagate's nearline HDDs have been allocated for 2027 and 2029 under long-term supply agreements (LTAs), with some customers looking to secure supply in 2029.

"Based on the long-term supply agreements in place today, the vast majority of our nearline exabytes are now allocated into calendar 2028," Mosley said. "[…] As our strategic relationships deepen, many are actively seeking to extend planning horizons through 2029 and beyond, which we believe reflects growing confidence in their own long-term infrastructure needs."

Seagate's LTAs not only define exabytes, but also product configuration and prices. As it turns out, both are set for the 'entirety of calendar 2027.' Meanwhile, Seagate is flexible on pricing of drives that are not covered by LTAs as well as newly signed LTAs, so the company is implying price increases, following makers of 3D NAND and SSDs.

"We continue to execute our value-based pricing strategy, balancing a stronger demand environment with our objective of supporting sustainable, profitable growth over the long term," Mosley said.

"Our volume was a little bit higher in fiscal Q4," said Gianluca Romano, chief financial officer of Seagate, during the call. "We think can be maybe a little bit of output available in fiscal Q1. Of course, we are pricing that increased output at a very good price right now."

The key advantage of Seagate's high-capacity drives based on the company's Mozaic platforms is, of course, its HAMR technology, which is gradually increasing its share within the company's nearline HDD shipments. HAMR-based products accounted for a 40% exabyte share of Seagate's nearline HDDs as of early July and are on track to account for 70% of the company's nearline exabytes shipments by early July 2027. Moreover, nearly half of Seagate's nearline capacity will rely on its 40TB-class HDDs featuring its Mozaic 4 platform.

"We expect to achieve our next ramp milestone by exiting calendar 2026 with 50% of our HAMR exabytes on our Mozaic 4 platform," Mosley said.

For the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2026 ended on July 3, Seagate earned $3.629 billion, up from $2.444 billion it earned in the same quarter a year ago. The company's gross margin totaled 52.3%, up from 37.4% in Q4 FY2025, and its net income reached $1.294 billion. The company's FY2026 revenue was $12.195 billion, up from $9.097 billion in the prior year. The net income increased more than twice year-over-year to $3.184 billion, with gross margin reaching 45.6%.

An Nvidia employee has been detained in Taiwan over allegations of forgery and breach of trust, in relation to the Supermicro smuggling scandal, that saw servers ostensibly sold to companies in Southeast Asia routed to China instead. Nvidia itself hasn't been accused of wrongdoing, and it published a statement calling smuggling a "nonstarter," saying that any GPUs sold through such a system would have no "service, support, or updates."

But that hasn't stopped Nvidia from taking its own measures to reduce its exposure to potential future smuggling efforts. Earlier this month, it created a form of "whitelist" for companies it sells to. It also investigated the firms it will continue to do business with, even sending staff members to customer data centers at the urging of the White House for verification.

Prosecutors have made it clear from the start that Supermicro isn't under investigation, merely its employees. The same is true of Nvidia. But as the AI frontier model race heats up and the White House floats banning Chinese models outright, Nvidia could face further restrictions on its hardware sales and greater scrutiny of its international actions.

Investigation escalation

The Supermicro smuggling scandal first came to light in March, when a trio of individuals were detained for deliberately mislabelling servers planned for sale to Southeast Asian countries. Instead, though, they sold them to China, getting around US export controls. The detentions included Supermicro co-founder, Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, as well as a Supermicro sales manager in Taiwan, and a third-party broker who previously worked at Supermicro.

Where those detentions happened on U.S. soil, though, the investigations went international in May, when the Taiwan Keelung District Prosecutors' Office executed search warrants against three individuals it claimed were involved in illicit smuggling efforts. Although it was said to be independent of the U.S.-led investigation, it involved the same companies and was part of the same overall scheme designed to smuggle Nvidia hardware into China.

In Taiwanese law, selling GPUs to China — even the U.S.-restricted kind — isn't strictly a crime, but filing fraudulent paperwork and falsifying documentation absolutely is. That's why Taiwanese authorities have leaned on local fraud laws to tackle this increasingly international case.

Although the authorities were clear that Supermicro as a company wasn't being investigated, a number of high-level employees were. That continued in June when Taiwanese officials raided the Supermicro offices in Taiwan, as well as the homes of six individuals and three company sites, all said to be involved in the smuggling scheme.

The widening scope of the investigation ultimately pulled in workers from Supermicro distributor Albatron Technology and data center operator Chief Telecom. Taiwan has since said it is considering placing a criminal ban on all AI chip exports to China, locking down smuggling routes that have been actively exploited for several years.

But now the investigation is escalating up the supply chain and has now reached Nvidia itself. Although the company isn't under investigation, Nvidia's culling of potentially problematic suppliers and buyers might not do much if its own workers are facilitating the smuggling actions.

This is serious

The Nvidia employee in question has the surname Chang, but has remained otherwise unnamed. He was detained on suspicion of falsifying business documents, with authorities searching his home and workplace on July 24, marking the first time that Nvidia's premises have been investigated in this manner since the start of the smuggling scandal.

Prosecutors consider him strongly suspected of the charges, with a very real risk for attempted flight, destruction of evidence, and collusion with witnesses.

"Smuggling is a nonstarter," an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "We primarily sell our products to well-known partners, including OEMs, who help us ensure that all sales comply with U.S. export control rules. Even relatively small exporters and shipments are subject to thorough review and scrutiny on both sides of the globe, and any diverted products would have no service, support, or updates."

Although authorities are clear that they are not investigating Nvidia as a company, an employee's involvement in the scheme will put a spotlight on Nvidia's actions and raise further questions about any additional involvement it or its employees may have had.

CEO Jensen Huang said in May that there was "no evidence of any AI chip diversion," but the situation has obviously changed since then. At the beginning of June, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to Nvidia general counsel Tim Ter, asking for evidence that supported Huang's claims.

Supply and demand

At the time of writing, there is a legitimate channel for Chinese firms to purchase Nvidia GPUs, but they're not the most cutting-edge Blackwell chips. There are older Nvidia GPUs granted licenses that are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, with the U.S. government taking a 25% revenue share cut of the sales. This reportedly adds up to just 75,000 units for 10 different Chinese companies - a relatively trivial amount of GPUs for Nvidia.

This is for the China-only, neutered Nvidia GPUs like H20 and H100s — not the cutting-edge GB200 and GB300 Blackwell-based stacks available to Western AI developers.

But this legal demand comes despite the lack of cutting-edge hardware options, the regulatory hoops that those involved need to jump through, and the Chinese government using carrots and sticks to encourage the use of domestic chip options.

That's because for certain tasks, Nvidia GPUs remain the best. For training, there's nothing that can compete with Nvidia's options. Chinese firms like Deepseek have tried previously, but they had to switch back to Nvidia when Chinese alternatives didn't measure up. Although some post-training fine-tuning is now possible on Chinese hardware, the Moonshot's headline-grabbing Kimi K3 was trained on potentially smuggled Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.

Considering the impact that Kimi K3 has had on the AI industry, it's hard not to imagine other Chinese AI developers looking to have their own "Deepseek moment" wouldn't search out access to Blackwell GPUs themselves.

The net may be closing on the Supermicro smuggling scheme, but the incentive is there for others to take its place, if they haven't already.

Steam Machine fans who weren’t lucky enough to get a chance to buy the console on its first drop will have to wait until as late as December 2026 to get it. Valve said in its update that the reservation queue varies between products and regions, meaning Valve is already going through the waitlist for some versions of the consoles in select areas. However, it seems that others would have to wait longer if they chose a particularly popular trim of the Steam Machine in a region where there are many buyers, too.

“We’re fulfilling orders on a daily basis, sending out emails to reservation holders with the option to purchase in the order in which they landed on the list post-randomization. We expect everyone in the reservation queue will have the option to purchase by the end of this year,” Valve said in its update. It also added, “With each reservation queue and corresponding waitlist being per-product, per-region, they can move at different speeds based on demand. This means for some products in some regions, we've reached the end of the reservation queue and have started inviting folks from the waitlist.”

That means users who reserved the Steam Machine but haven’t had the chance to buy them yet can expect to get their hands on one before the new year. While this means that all the original reservations will finally be fulfilled in 2026, it doesn’t offer much comfort for those who want to have a new gaming PC console just in time for the holiday season.

Valve lets you 3D-print your own Steam Machine case, face plates

Users who haven’t received their Steam Machine yet (or even those who didn’t order one) could 3D-print their own shell for the console in the meantime. That’s because the company just released the CAD files for the “Gabe Cube” on GitHub in STP format. This lets you create your own face plates and case based on Valve’s own designs, ensuring that the cases or skins you create yourself will exactly match the PC console.

We’ve already seen some manufacturers offer custom plates and skins for the Steam Machine, although Dbrand had to drop the Portal 2-inspired Companion Cube after Valve threatened to sue the company for copyright infringement. With the release of these files, you can 3D-print or create your own skin (even your own Companion Cube skin) without worrying about getting sued as long as you follow the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license that Valve put on the PC console. ‘

If you’re brave enough, you can even make your own case for the Steam Machine and transfer the innards to that custom one you build. Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the Valve engineers who gave us in-depth details on the Steam Machine, warned that doing so might void your warranty, though.

“Your Steam Machine is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want,” Griffais said on the GitHub post. “That said, we highly recommend you leave it to professionals. Any damage you do will not be covered by your warranty – but more importantly, you might break your Steam Machine, or even get hurt! Be careful, and have fun.”

We recently toured China-based Lenovo’s new production facilities here in the US. Lenovo is the number one player in the global PC market (by shipments), with products spanning consumer, business, and enterprise sectors. But while Lenovo is a Chinese-based company, it has a significant business presence in the United States. Its U.S. headquarters, which opened in 2005, is in Morrisville, NC, right in the heart of the Research Triangle Park. The company also opened its first PC manufacturing line, a short drive away in Whitsett, NC, shortly after.

This past Friday, Lenovo took the latest step in its efforts to expand its U.S. manufacturing presence with a symbolic ribbon-cutting for the expansion of manufacturing at its Whitsett facility. The company invested millions of dollars into the facility, doubling its footprint to 890,000 square feet. There are currently 400 line workers, with the capacity to expand that number to 1,000 in the near future.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why Lenovo is making this investment, as it comes down to two words: artificial intelligence.

Lenovo in Whitsett

As Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, Executive VP and President for the Infrastructure Solutions Group, explained, for many of Lenovo’s customers, “AI is moving from the hype cycle now into the hero cycle.” With many of its customers looking to increase reliance on U.S.-produced hardware, an “infrastructure they can trust is going to be the catalyst for that.” So, it only made sense to tap into resources and the local community it has fostered over the past two decades

“Because behind every AI breakthrough, it's powerful, powerful infrastructure,” Gorakhpurwalla continued. “As technology becomes more advanced, I think that building high-quality infrastructure closer to our customers is becoming more important than ever.”

North Carolina might not always have been at the forefront of people’s minds when it comes to technological leadership, and it’s a question that Ben Massey, VP Supply Chain for Lenovo, has often fielded. “You know, people ask me all the time, how are you going to make that work in North Carolina?” Massey explained. “The way it's going to work is that we've got an arc from the Triangle to the Triad with thousands of engineers, thousands of manufacturing people in R&D who can work in supply chain, people who can all work together to bring this technology together with speed. Faster product development to mass production, shorter customer lead times, and greater end-to-end cost efficiency.”

Lenovo’s main U.S. R&D hub in Morrisville is just over an hour's drive away from the Whitsett facility along Interstate 40. In addition, the company can pull young talent from nearby universities like NC State, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest, along with the state’s robust community college system.

Lenovo and its local contractors were able to take the facility from an empty warehouse to a fully functioning server production line in nine months. That included the necessary electricity capacity (up to 20 MW) from Duke Energy.

By the Numbers

I was given a full tour of the Whisett manufacturing facility (along with other members of the press, Lenovo dignitaries, and local lawmakers), from start to finish. It was an impressive operation; one that I wish I could express to you in photos. However, photos and videos were strictly forbidden due to the proprietary nature of the hardware and testing equipment, and to protect Lenovo's customers' privacy.

The kitting area, where the components like processors, memory, and storage are assembled, encompasses 26,000 square feet. There are 10 kitting lines, where workers currently assemble 200 racks per week, with the capability to double that number to 400. The 50 team members in this area process over 150,000 parts per day.

There are currently seven assembly lines, residing in a space roughly double the size of the kitting area (53,000 square feet). Lenovo has the capacity to produce 1,400 server nodes per day across 28 assembly stations (one server is produced every 60 seconds).

At full tilt, Lenovo says that it will have 1,000 operators running three shifts. However, there are currently around 380. Employees get roughly 1,000 hours of training, and they rotate throughout different phases of the building process to hone their skills.

After touring the kitting and assembly lines, we moved into the testing areas, where L10 testing takes place. There are 10 thermally controlled testing pods, with 16 test racks per pod. The room is chilled using massive Computer Room Air Handlers (CRAH), each with 1 MW of cooling capacity.

In addition, there are 30 Vertiv Liebert XDU direct liquid cooling units (expandable to 50), each with a capacity of up to 300 kW, to aid with testing finished packages for customers. Lenovo explained that Nvidia GB300 racks consume 140 kW, while Vera Rubin will consume 230 kW at peak load. For comparison, the average U.S. household consumes between 1 and 1.5 kW per day. That's a lot of power coming from a rack measuring 18 inches across and seven feet tall. Lenovo’s first taste of Vera Rubin is said to be making its way to the Whitsett facility by the end of August.

We also toured where the massive freshwater pipes enter the building to fuel the cooling operations, along with the utility room, where the impressive overhead electrical conduits feed power into the site from a nearby substation. Working with Duke Energy, Lenovo was able to go from temporary power at the site to full power within 7 months.

Closing Thoughts

I’m not a native to this state; however, I’ve lived in central NC for 40 of my 46 years on this earth. So it was rather impressive to see the Whitsett facility taking shape roughly 20 minutes from my childhood home. However, the sense of pride was also clouded by the realities of the times that we live in. The proliferation of AI in nearly every facet of our lives is the entire impetus behind the need to expand server manufacturing capacity for the homeland. Companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others crave the computing hardware necessary to feed AI demands, which in turn is driving a wedge between big tech and local communities. From strains on local water supplies and power grids to the acquisition of land to build new data centers, we’re at a real crossroads where local communities, local governments, and big tech companies are each looking to have a say in how our future plays out.

Limits on the amount of VRAM on Nvidia's consumer GPUs have forced the modding community to take matters into their own hands. Time and again we've seen various DIY memory upgrades being performed, and it's even offered as a proper repair service in underground markets, but rarely is it done openly. As such, we've just spotted a vendor that will upgrade the 11GB of VRAM on an RTX 2080 Ti to 22GB and provide the BIOS for it upfront — no shady back-alley deals required.

The name of the shop is GPU Solutions (very creative, we know), and it's based in the UAE, though they say they serve customers around the world. On their website, you can select the "Graphics Card Memory Upgrade" service for both the RTX 2080 Ti and the RTX 3070, though the former has more details. These guys also have a YouTube channel where they've already performed the upgrade on an Asus Strix variant before.

The upgrade works just like any other you might've already seen. The card is disassembled to reach the PCB and remove the preexisting VRAM modules. The RTX 2080 Ti uses 11x 1GB GDDR6 chips, so replacing them with the same amount of 2GB GDDR6 doubles the memory capacity instantly. This is a rather straightforward way of going about a VRAM upgrade, because oftentimes it actually requires a custom PCB.

Once the hardware part of the job is done, the VBIOS is then manually edited to support the new memory pool. This can either be an easy tweak or a lot of work just to get the BIOS to recognize the card, depending on how that specific GPU was built by the manufacturer. For instance, Nvidia was once said to include 16GB of memory with the RTX 3070, but it ended up shipping with 8GB instead, so customizing the BIOS is as simple as unlocking its full potential.

In this case, there wasn't any software tweaking; the core supports multiple memory configs, so the repairperson physically modified the memory strap resistors on the PCB. The original config for the 11GB modules was set to low, low, low. They desoldered and moved the resistors to a new configuration: high, high, and low, which made the GPU recognize and report 22GB of VRAM inside GPU-Z.

The fact that you get not only double the VRAM on your RTX 2080 Ti but a working, stable BIOS out of the box adds to the overall package significantly. These kinds of mods are usually very hands-on, which means limited to just enthusiasts and tinkerers, but the factory-like service GPU Solution is providing means pretty much anyone can get it done without a hassle.

Their website doesn't mention the charges for an upgrade like this, but considering the ongoing component crisis, the memory modules won't be cheap. They also clarify that the upgrade can only be performed on a card with "compatible PCB layouts." If yours qualifies, they'll also replace the thermal pads and thermal paste accordingly, plus provide substantial benchmarking data to prove the modded card is stable.

Doubling the VRAM should allow you to squeeze a lot more performance out of your 2080 Ti in AI workloads and creative applications such as video editing. It's also helpful in gaming but not to a significant degree since the GPU itself isn't as powerful as modern offerings that are otherwise bottlenecked by memory capacity. Ultimately, this remains a pretty reasonable upgrade because the true, full potential of this GPU was achieved three years ago when someone modded it with an insane 44GB of VRAM.

When you use a laptop, you might assume that it will always perform the same, whether you use it while plugged in or unplugged. After all, these systems are designed to be used on the go. But for a long time, that hasn't been the case.

More recently, some silicon vendors have been boasting about closer parity in plugged and unplugged performance, offering you similar power whether you're working at your desk or anywhere else. To see the current state of this, we've taken samples of the latest laptop from each major CPU manufacturer: Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple, and run a few tests to see how they compare.

For the Windows systems, we used the balanced power profile, which was already the default on the majority of these laptops, while the MacBook Pro has an "automatic" power management profile out of the box.

Where we could, we went for top-end processors, including the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H, Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, and Apple's M5 Max. In AMD's case, we had two Gorgon Point processors, a Ryzen AI 9 465 and a Ryzen AI 7 445. To see some generational gains, we also included an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V "Lunar Lake" chip.

We tested three ways: in Cinebench 2026 single-core and multi-core workloads, as well as using Handbrake, an open source video conversion tool, to transcode a 4K video to 1080p.

Note that we're not comparing the scores of the systems to each other. We're comparing the systems to themselves, to see how performance changes on the battery.

With those tests run, we can calculate percentage differences to see percentage changes. Notably, a number of systems actually increased performance ever so slightly on battery. This occurred the most on multi-threaded Cinebench, where the Zenbook A16 with Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme increased by 13.06%, while the ThinkPad X9 bumped up by 4.98%.

Qualcomm's chip was by far the most variable. While it dramatically increased in performance on battery for Cinebench nT, it dropped a similar amount for Handbrake.

But it was Apple and Intel that led the pack. While the Core Ultra X9 388H had the most consistent score on average, it did show 3% swings in multi-threaded Cinebench and on Handbrake. Apple's M5 Max results were the most consistent throughout, never swaying even a full percentage point on battery.

The least consistent system on battery power was the Acer Swift Go 16 AI, running on an AMD Ryzen AI 7 445. That system lost a ton of performance when unplugged from the wall, dropping as much as 56.25% performance off the wall. On average, benchmark scores were 50% lower on that system. On the HP OmniBook X Flip 14, Ryzen AI 9 465, it still dropped, but far less, losing an average of 5.45% performance on power based on these tests.

On the bright side, things are going in the right direction. Intel and Apple's most advanced systems give you very similar experiences on battery and power — at least in these tests. Snapdragon can, but sometimes it swings a bit. It's really AMD that needs to catch up in this regard. And we know that can be done. The Steam Deck, which was released in 2022, was specifically designed to have similar performance on and off the charger, and it uses a semi-custom AMD SoC. Its AMD-based opponents, however, still get better performance on a charge. You not only have to have your chip designed around battery and performance. You also need to make sure that the system around it is optimized for that.

The other side of this coin is efficiency. If you're able to perform heavy tasks on battery without losing performance, you're likely going to do it. That's especially the case if you do field work in creative or industrial fields. That means ensuring that your system can handle your workload long enough to get it done. But hey, there's always an external battery, right?

Police from Emporia, Kansas, arrested a teacher for applauding a speaker who was speaking out against a proposed zoning change to accommodate a planned data center in the area. According to 12 News, the police dragged 37-year-old Lux Claridge from the community meeting and charged him with disorderly conduct and interference with law enforcement. The commissioners had reportedly repeatedly warned against clapping and making other reactions while someone was speaking.

A video circulating on the internet shows Claridge clapping five times after a speaker closed their statement. We can hear in the clip below someone saying, “Ask him to leave,” followed by a second voice confirming, “Can I?” The voice then asked a police officer, “Chief? Will you ask-will you take the next person out that claps or anything, please? Thank you.”

The cops then approached Claridge, who said, “I have a right to speak.” The police were nonetheless insistent, which is when he said, “Drag me out.” Four officers then proceeded to cuff the teacher and hoisted him off to Lyon County Jail.

The data center’s critics warned against the project, saying that it could strain the local power supply and negatively impact the residents’ water quality. Their concerns are not without merit, as AI data centers have caused a massive 76% increase in electricity costs in the U.S.’s largest power region, while a Meta site is accused of muddying an entire town’s water supply.

Despite that, Emporia, located about 100 miles Southwest of Kansas City, approved the zoning changes needed for the Flint Hills Digital Campus project to move forward with the permitting process. This does not mean that the data center will immediately start construction, though, as it probably still needs to go through several more steps before it can break ground.

This isn’t the first time that a data center dissenter was hauled off to jail for reasonably pushing back against the said project. An Oklahoma farmer was arrested back in April for trespassing after going a few seconds over his allotted time and handing paperwork to the commissioners. Pushback against projects like these have been happening across the country, with several jurisdictions like Seattle and New York State enacting one-year moratoriums to study the potential effects of these infrastructure projects and how they could be mitigated.

President Donald Trump created the “ratepayer protection pledge” to force AI hyperscalers to “pay their own way” when it comes to electricity costs. He has even expanded this recently to include states and utility companies, with 23 governors and 187 firms signing up on the promise. Unfortunately, this is just a piece of paper and has no legal or regulatory power over the signees, with tech companies pushing back against a California bill that wants to turn this into law.

At the moment, Oregon is the only state that has passed and enacted a law that forces electricity consumers that used 20 MW or more to cover their fair share. Because of this, Portland General Electric, the state’s biggest power generator, has increased data center bills by 30% while cutting residential electricity costs by 1.3%.

Claridge is currently out on bail and is awaiting his hearing in September. "I'm glad to be out, but this is an inconvenience, really," Claridge said to local media. "It's not really deterring me from speaking out or, I guess, clapping."