Toshiba's Philippine plant ships its first data-centre hard drives and aims to nearly double its output by fiscal 2027

Toshiba Information Equipment (Philippines), a subsidiary of Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage, has begun making nearline hard disk drives at its plant in Laguna Technopark, the company said on 2 October, and has made the first shipment from the newly expanded production line. The plant previously concentrated on hard drives for personal computers.

Nearline drives are the high-capacity disks that data centres use to store large volumes of data; the release says these are designed to support AI and cloud workloads. The company said it will keep investing, “aiming to nearly double its annual production capacity” by fiscal 2027 compared with fiscal 2025. It measures that capacity in storage, not in the number of drives.

Toshiba made the announcement at the subsidiary's 30th anniversary ceremony in Manila. Its release gives no investment figure. A figure that trade outlets attributed to the Japanese press does not appear in Toshiba's own document and is not repeated here.

The shift at Laguna, from drives for PCs to drives for data centres, is a sign that the AI build-out reaches storage as well as chips and power: the plant that made disks for laptops and desktops now ships the larger drives that store the data AI and cloud services run on.

• Confirmed Toshiba's Philippine subsidiary has begun producing nearline HDDs at Laguna Technopark and made the first shipment from the expanded line. Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage
• Claimed The company aims to nearly double annual production capacity, measured in storage, by fiscal 2027 against fiscal 2025. Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage