US data storage company Seagate Technology is to invest £100 million (€115 million) over five years in a research and development project in Northern Ireland that will see it develop cutting-edge hard drives for large data centres.
The investment, which will help Seagate develop new recording heads and laser technology, will be supported by £15 million from economic development agency Invest NI, and will lead to new, highly skilled jobs in Seagate’s research and development and manufacturing departments at its Derry facility.
It will also support the local supplier ecosystem, sourcing more material and labour from the local community.
Seagate specialises in mass-capacity data storage. It is investing in new technology to meet the growing demand for more data storage capacity, sparked by hyperscale data centres and the AI data boom.
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“In today’s AI-driven world, data volume isn’t just growing – the value of data is evolving as organisations rethink what it takes to train AI models and retain new, highly valuable data. To unlock data’s full potential, we need storage solutions that are not only massive in capacity but engineered for reliability, durability, and scale. That’s exactly what this investment enables,” said John Morris, chief technology officer of Seagate Technology.
“Our Northern Ireland facility is a global centre of excellence, producing over a quarter of the world’s recording heads and pioneering semiconductor laser R & D – critical for next-generation hard drives.”
“ With Invest NI’s support, we’re accelerating the development of 60TB and beyond capacities, laying the foundation for achieving 100 TB drives. This project will expand our global engineering expertise and reinforce our long-standing commitment to innovation in Northern Ireland.”
Seagate first came to Northern Ireland in 1994 when it invested £500 million and created 500 jobs. It has invested more than £1 billion in the region, including a £55 million investment announced in 2019 in the Derry plant.
“We have worked very closely with Seagate over the past three decades and have helped the facility here evolve into a world-leading manufacturing and pioneering R & D Centre,” said Kieran Donoghue, chief executive at Invest NI.
“This puts Northern Ireland at the forefront of the company’s innovation plans and will enable it to ramp up productivity through state-of the-art equipment.”
