The year 2024 has witnessed the awakening and growth of digital power all across Asia. What will the Year of the Snake herald?
If the Dragon Year was a time when data applications increased everywhere, then 2025 is expected to be pivotal for digital intelligence to mature and stabilise, propelled by the accelerated deployment of AI and related technology applications, as well as a surge in digital data use across a wide array of industries. Here’s my take on the market in the year ahead.Â
Storage bottlenecks expected in Asia
The region is creating data in unprecedented volumes and is becoming the dominant force in global commerce. According to market researcher IDC, more than 400 zettabytes of data are expected to be created worldwide by 2028, with volumes expanding by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24%. With its massive population of over 4.6 billion people and a robust digital ecosystem,
Asia is a significant contributor to this trend. For its part, China's data infrastructure market grew 30% in 2024 to 160 billion yuan (US$22.26 billion) and the total number of data centre racks in use exceeded 2.11 million, according to the National Data Administration.
In South East Asia, the Indonesian online retail market is expected to reach US$95 billion in 2025.
As AI matures and scales, the value of data will increase, leading to more data being stored for longer. However, the storage installed base is forecasted to only have a 17% CAGR, increasing at a slower pace than the growth in data generated. This disparity in growth rates will disrupt the global storage supply and demand equilibrium.
As organisations become less experimental and more strategic in their use of AI, more data will be created.
As organisations become less experimental and more strategic in their use of AI, more data will be created. Image and video creation with AI models will grow 167 times by 2028 and the data needs storage. Organisations will need to build long-term capacity to ensure enough storage supply, and fully monetise their investments in AI infrastructure.
Storage innovation will be key
According to a new survey by Recon Analytics, nearly two-thirds of respondents (61%) from companies that use cloud as their leading storage medium expect their cloud-based storage to grow by more than 100% over the next 3 years. The survey also indicates that 46% of respondents do not believe current infrastructure can keep pace with AI growth. Moreover, financial, regulatory, and environmental concerns will increasingly challenge the need for greater physical data centre space and capacity.
Electrical demand for these data centres is expected to grow 160 percent over 2023 levels by 2030, according to a recent estimate by Goldman Sachs Research. All this requires rapid innovation in the data centre. Higher areal density hard drives, which expand the amount of data stored on a given unit of storage media, will enable greater data capacity in data centres, avoiding the need to build new sites, driving significant TCO savings and reducing environmental impact.
AI impact to grow
The scale of global data centre storage market is expected to reach US$63.72 billion in 2024 and US$71.76 billion in 2025 according to Precedence Research. Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing region in the coming years to 2034 it says, although the U.S. remains the most influential market player at present and for the foreseeable future.
AI at scale demands storage at scale.
AI at scale demands storage at scale. AI has had a significant impact on the data centre storage market because it requires huge data sets to train models, which is the main reason driving the demand for high-capacity storage solutions in the global market. In the Year of the Snake, more businesses in Asia will look to allocate a higher share of their core IT spending to AI, to leverage more insights to enhance productivity and management efficiency.
Surge of edge AI
Edge AI is expected to become increasingly popular in the Year of the Snake. Processing data closer to where it is generated – at the edge of the network – can be crucial in applications needing immediate analysis of data like autonomous vehicles, smart cities, smart education, and industrial IoT.
Moreover, the proliferation of 5G networks across Asia, which offer higher bandwidth and lower latency, will further accelerate the adoption of Edge AI by enabling faster communication between edge devices and the rest of the network and enabling devices like PCs and smartphones to process AI tasks without relying on cloud infrastructure
Greater trust in the data demanded
According to the Recon Analytics survey, 72% surveyed say they use AI today. But AI can only be trusted if the data behind it is trustworthy. Whether it’s from capturing training checkpoints to saving source data sets, the more data is retained during the process, the more it can validate AI is trustworthy. 88%of respondents believe adoption of Trustworthy AI requires increased need to store more data for longer periods of time. Data therefore needs to be available long term, not just to comply with evolving legal requirements but also to ensure that inference is explainable.
Recent research by Deloitte found users are still reluctant to trust AI, particularly in high-stakes, complex decisions. To counter this, companies applying trustworthy AI principles, including focusing on governance, regulatory compliance and education, will face a mass data surge, which means scalable storage innovations are more critical to the AI ecosystem than ever before. This echoes with the Recon Analytics survey that storage ranks as the second most important component of AI infrastructure, with security ranking top one.
Sustainability comes to fore
The Year of the Snake will see a marked uptick in environmental awareness and sustainable development as the digital economy broadens in size and scope with the increasing deployment of new technologies. Companies will be paying more attention to energy conservation, sustainability and ESG issues in the coming year.
