Good morning!
Opening thoughts. It seems Microsoft Corp. paid anywhere between $8 million and $10 million for a Super Bowl commercial, which tells us that Excel has AI powered by Copilot to help simplify your data. These ad rates are being reported as benchmarks for this iconic sporting event in the US — one that catches eyeballs worldwide (also because of the celebrities, perhaps less of understanding the sport itself), which is why I’m bucketing the spend within a range.
I wonder whether this advertisement will be listed under AI capex in Microsoft’s next earnings report. Also, the next time Microsoft tells you they are firing some employees (“layoffs”, in corporate speak) because of an AI pivot and operational efficiency, remember this spending.
By the way, this would have been planned and finalised at some point in a year where the tech giant laid off approximately 15,000 employees. Need I mention the saga of broken Windows updates, in an era when around 30% of the company’s code is claimed to be written by AI?
EDITOR’S CORNER
In the AI gold rush, WD’s hard drives win
All AI conversation tends to revolve around how awesome it is, how awesome the AI chips are, how awesome AI data centres will be once they are built, and how awesome it will be after everyone has lost their jobs to AI with all the time in the world to spend with loved ones. Little do we talk about storage, which is at the very foundation of AI—be it on the devices that you use, or the massive infrastructure investments AI firms keep talking about.
Perfectly placed to take advantage of this are the storage companies, and even within that WD (or Western Digital Corp. as the legal entity) has the sort of momentum that no one else has. Let me give you some headline numbers to illustrate.
WD has silently, and efficiently transformed into a data centre-led company, with 90% of its revenue tied to data centres, cloud, and AI workloads. It’s a pivot away from consumer-led dependence. In its latest quarterly earnings, WD showed revenue of $3.02 billion—up 25% year-on-year.
HDDs, or hard disk drives (and not SSDs, or solid state drives) remain key to AI infrastructure that’s being built, and will be built. WD estimates that around 80% of hyperscale storage capacity continues to run on HDDs, even in AI-first data centres.
For the brand (and the accountants), there is the thick reassurance layer of long-term hyperscale agreements that extend through 2027 and 2028, which gives them the stability with regard to demand predictability.
“WD shipped 3.5 million units of its 32 TB nearline HDD in the last quarter, with shipments expected to reach around 4 million units this quarter—one of the fastest ramps of a high-capacity drive in the industry,” Owais Mohammed, Director Sales – MEA & India for WD, told HT recently.
There is a clear vision of what’s next, and that leads us to 100 TB. WD’s long-term data-centre roadmap, with the backdrop of high-capacity drive consumption ramping up significantly, comes with a confirmation that the 100 TB HDDs could well be reality by 2029. It is “reinforcing confidence in sustained capex-light growth within existing manufacturing footprint,” says Mohammed. WD has already introduced the world’s first 40 TB ePMR HDD this month, and volume production is expected to begin later this year. 60 TB is next on the agenda.
- Key: ePMR (Energy-Assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) and HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) are advanced HDD recording tech designed to increase storage density beyond limits of traditional magnetic recording. While ePMR is in mass use, HAMR is believed to be the generational leap toward 100 TB capacities.
WD is betting big on High Bandwidth Drive and Dual Pivot design, which it believes are breakthrough technologies that can help solve the problem of capacity and performance bottlenecks. They insist these drives will deliver 2X bandwidth as they are in the current generation, and up to 8X bandwidth in future iterations. The idea is to improve input and output performance as well, which means supporting more and more AI workloads on HDD—the economics for which works better than on SSDs.
“In the Indian context, storage density is now an infrastructure innovation, not just a hardware spec. Higher-capacity drives reduce rack count, cooling needs, and energy per terabyte—making them foundational to power-efficient, AI-ready data centres as India’s DC capacity scales rapidly,” Mohammed explains.
SECOND THOUGHTS
BOBCARD’s financial inclusion play
Whenever there is a conversation about credit cards, an obsessiveness that underlines it all is reward points and how competition stacks up.
I was quite impressed when BOBCARD, a subsidiary of Bank of Baroda, told me they are ready to launch a Braille-enabled BOBCARD PREMIER credit card. Now that is financial inclusion for a community largely ignored by India’s financial institutions so far. It is also honouring the Indian Blind Women’s Cricket Team, winners of the first Blind Women’s Cricket T20 World Cup.
The Braille-enabled BOBCARD PREMIER credit card should simplify identification and usability for the visually impaired. Some of us would never understand that confidence and reassurance when making a transaction.
To be sure, it’s been done before too.
Union Bank of India has the Sparsh credit card supporting Braille, while Bank of Baroda has the inSIGHT Braille debit card. Mastercard too has its Touch Card design with integrated notches (round for debit, square for credit, and triangular for prepaid). One can hope more banks and Indian fintech follow through, soon enough.
That’s all folks. Stay tuned for next week’s Neural Dispatch and Wired Wisdom. And subscribe, will ya, for there’s tons coming your way. Direct your bouquets and brickbats down below.
Edited and produced by Tushar Deep Singh.