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IDC’s Worldwide Hard Disk Drive Taxonomy, 2026

Edward Burns — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study defines and provides a framework for analyzing the worldwide hard disk drive market.

“After another year of strong growth in the enterprise HDD market, the HDD industry remains in the midst of a supply constrained environment with strong demand from enterprise and cloud hyperscalers outstripping industry supply capacity,” according to Ed Burns, research director on HDD and storage technologies, IDC. Burns adds, “This will likely continue until higher-capacity drives, such as 40TB and 50TB HDDs, begin shipping in the next couple of years.”

Powering Progress Together: Key Takeaways from the IDC Utilities Xchange 2026

Roberta Bigliani, Gaia Gallotti, Jean-François Segalotto, John Villali — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation highlights some key topics discussed at the 15th edition of the IDC European Utilities Xchange (IDCUEX), held in Valencia, Spain, on March 2 and 3, 2026, under the theme "Powering Progress Together."

The two-day event was attended by around 55 European utility executives from 23 countries, representing 42 utilities and energy companies, plus business partners Schneider Electric, Bidgely, OverIT, Ferranti, and Gentrack.

Through keynote presentations, fireside chats, workshops, roundtable discussions, and more, the community focused on scaling digital and AI-driven transformation, reinforcing cybersecurity, modernizing infrastructure, and deepening collaboration across the ecosystem. The event brought together utilities, regulators, technology partners, and customers. Flexibility, innovation, divergent thinking, and workforce development surfaced as core enablers of a resilient, inclusive, and future-ready energy system.

Quantinuum, NVIDIA, AWS, and Hiverge Advance AI-Driven Quantum Algorithm Development

Heather West, PhD — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Quantinuum’s March 2026 announcement shows how AI is starting to play a meaningful role in speeding up quantum algorithm development, helping address one of the biggest barriers to broader adoption. By bringing together AI, high-performance computing, and quantum hardware through a strong partner ecosystem, the company highlights a more practical, integrated path forward that could accelerate real-world use cases and influence how the quantum market evolves.

World Backup Day: A Timely Reflection on Data Growth, Storage Complexity, and Resilience

Adam Wright — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

World Backup Day (observed each year on March 31) continues to be a useful moment for organizations and consumers to reflect on the importance of data resiliency, particularly as digital ecosystems become more complex and data creation accelerates across every industry segment. The annual event underscores the necessity of taking a proactive stance toward data protection. It also highlights the growing need for technology suppliers to deliver solutions that are adaptive, automated, and capable of safeguarding distributed data assets from an expanding spectrum of risks.

The continued expansion of digital interactions, intelligent devices, and AI-enabled workflows is reshaping the global data landscape and placing new pressure on traditional notions of backup and recovery. IDC’s Global DataSphere research indicates that the installed base of data-creating devices will climb significantly over the next several years, and worldwide data generation is expected to grow at a 2025–2029 CAGR of 24.9%, surpassing 527,000 exabytes of creation in 2029. This surge in data creation introduces mounting operational and security vulnerabilities, reinforcing the need for resilient storage infrastructures capable of supporting both high-velocity workloads and long-term protection requirements. As organizations embed AI into more of their operations, the volume of intermediate files, model checkpoints, training outputs, and derived datasets has also expanded, adding new categories of “must-protect” information that did not exist at scale only a few years ago. These shifts elevate the strategic significance of backup from a backend maintenance function to a foundational enabler of business continuity, digital trust, and sustained innovation.

At the same time, IDC's Global StorageSphere continues to evolve as data placement becomes more distributed across on-premises environments, cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and emerging edge locations. This diversification has improved flexibility and performance for many organizations, yet it has also added significant complexity to backup strategies. Data now resides across an expanding collection of environments, each with its own governance requirements, recovery expectations, and security considerations. This fragmentation has created operational blind spots for many IT teams who struggle to maintain consistent protection policies and visibility across data that moves fluidly between endpoints, core datacenters, edge devices, and cloud-native applications. World Backup Day highlights the urgency of ensuring that protection policies follow data wherever it resides and that recovery processes remain consistent across hybrid and multicloud architectures. The event also underscores the importance of eliminating assumptions that cloud applications or platform-native tools inherently provide comprehensive backups; in reality, shared responsibility models place substantial accountability on the customer to ensure their data is recoverable.

For Consumers

The event serves as a reminder that no single backup location is sufficient in an era characterized by device proliferation and reliance on cloud-based services. Although cloud platforms provide convenience and accessibility, they are still susceptible to outages, sync errors, accidental deletions, or account-level compromise. A resilient personal data strategy therefore requires redundancy through the combined use of cloud services, external hard disk drives or SSDs, and other forms of local storage, reinforced through periodic testing to confirm that data can be successfully recovered when needed. As households accumulate more digital assets, from personal photos and financial documents to creative projects, home surveillance footage, and AI-enhanced content, the consequences of data loss become more severe. World Backup Day helps reinforce the idea that good backup hygiene is not a one-time action but an ongoing practice that adapts to changes in devices, applications, and usage patterns.

For Technology Suppliers

World Backup Day provides an opportunity to reinforce the value of modern, intelligent data-protection strategies. The scale and pace of data creation demand a shift from periodic, manual backup processes toward continuous and automated models that leverage analytics and machine learning to detect anomalies, identify emerging risks, and initiate protection tasks without direct human intervention. As organizations expand their use of hybrid and multicloud environments, suppliers must help customers centralize policies, streamline management, and maintain coherence across increasingly fragmented data estates. Vendors that successfully support integration with cloud object stores, containerized workloads, edge analytics platforms, and large-scale data lakes will be increasingly well positioned as customers look to unify protection across both legacy and next-generation applications. This is especially relevant as backup windows shrink, recovery time objectives tighten, and organizations demand protection mechanisms that are invisible to end users and non-disruptive to real-time operations.

Ransomware and other cyberattacks also continue to be major catalysts for investment in data-protection technologies, and organizations increasingly expect vendors to provide capabilities such as immutable storage, air-gapped architectures, and rapid restore workflows. These requirements are reshaping customer buying criteria and elevating the role of data resilience as a strategic differentiator rather than a basic operational necessity. Vendors that support these needs with flexible deployment models, scalable architectures, and strong integration across cloud and on-premises platforms are better positioned to meet evolving expectations. Recent events have also highlighted the importance of being able to restore not only infrastructure but also business-critical metadata, application context, and security configurations. In the aftermath of cyber incidents, organizations increasingly value recovery solutions that reduce the time and effort required to reconstruct full operational environments rather than simply restoring raw files.

For Enterprises

Enterprises themselves must pair modern technology with strong operational discipline to maintain resiliency. Automation can reduce human error while orchestration tools streamline routine tasks such as replication, scheduling, and validation. Regular audits, recovery testing, and cyber-readiness exercises help organizations identify vulnerabilities before they lead to disruptions, while layered protection that combines backup, replication, encryption, and disaster recovery strengthens overall security posture. As digital operations become ever more time-sensitive, many organizations are reevaluating their tolerance for downtime and rethinking long-standing assumptions about recovery point objectives. This has led to growing adoption of continuous data protection, immutable logging, and automated failover mechanisms that deliver higher levels of resilience without imposing undue operational overhead. At the same time, enterprises need to be aware that resilience is not exclusively a technical exercise but a cross-functional responsibility requiring coordination among IT, security, legal, compliance, and business-unit leaders.

The Importance of Education and Awareness

World Backup Day also underscores the importance of education and organizational awareness. Even the most advanced technologies require knowledgeable administrators and informed decision makers who understand the risks associated with data loss and the value of proactive planning. Vendors that support their customers through training, certification programs, managed services, and collaborative ecosystems can help build a stronger foundation for long-term resiliency. Education also plays a critical role in aligning expectations between technology providers and end users, particularly in cloud environments where shared responsibility models are often misunderstood.

As data becomes increasingly central to innovation and competitiveness, World Backup Day serves as an important catalyst for elevating best practices and reinforcing the cultural and operational commitment required to protect an organization’s most valuable digital assets. The event’s relevance grows each year as data becomes more distributed, cyber threats more sophisticated, and AI workflows more dependent on the integrity, recoverability, and continuous availability of the underlying data they consume.

Worldwide Semiconductor Market: Foundry Market Revenue, Capacity, Utilization Rate, and Tech Node Analysis, 2026

Galen Zeng — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Pivot Table examines the performance of the worldwide semiconductor foundry market. The following vendor and market data are provided:

Revenue analysis:

Worldwide foundry market: Annual data
Worldwide foundry market: Quarterly data

Capacity:

Worldwide foundry market: Total capacity analysis
Worldwide foundry market: Total capacity by region

Utilization:

Worldwide foundry market: Total utilization
Worldwide foundry market: Total utilization by vendor

Process node:

Worldwide foundry market: Process node
Worldwide foundry market: Process node — advanced process
Worldwide foundry market: Process node — mature process

General information:

Exchange rate

Datacenters: A Stress Test for Utility Strategy From Grid Constraint to System Redesign in the AI Era

Jean-François Segalotto — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation is a keynote delivered at the IDC European Utilities Xchange (IDCUEX) event, which was held in Valencia, Spain, on March 2 and 3, 2026. The presentation examines how the rapid expansion of hyperscale and AI-driven data centers is reshaping electricity demand patterns and creating new strategic challenges for utilities.

First, it explores how datacenter load growth differs from traditional electrification trends, highlighting four structural characteristics: scale, intensity, speed, and geographic concentration. Next, it analyzes the operational and regulatory implications for utilities, including nodal capacity constraints, interconnection timelines, and cost-allocation debates.

The keynote concludes by outlining strategic responses for utilities, including dynamic planning approaches; the commercialization of flexibility; the integration of time-based carbon frameworks; and early collaboration with datacenter developers to align infrastructure investment, system reliability, and decarbonization objectives.

IDC Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa Directions 2026: Cloud Professional Services Outlook

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation explores the expanding role of cloud and cloud-related professional services in the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META) region as organizations reinvent themselves in the agentic AI era.

This combines presentations from the IDC Directions event in Dubai, held in February 2026, to provide a unified view of key technology areas shaping the evolution of cloud professional services and the drivers of customer demand for these services. These technologies include IT services, cloud, cybersecurity, and AI.

“Service providers are undergoing a strategic shift in cloud-related services as they leverage AI technologies to deliver business value at higher velocity and greater scale. Customers are modernizing their infrastructure to leverage a complex mix of cloud-based technologies and are demanding more sophisticated service outcomes, including digital sovereignty, extensive automation, and strategic business alignment,” said Associate Research Director Jonathan Tullett, Services, IDC Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa.

IDC Survey: Sustainability and the C-Suite — Insights from IDC's C-Suite Study

Bjoern Stengel, Teodora Snoddy — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey presentation draws on findings from IDC's Worldwide C-Suite Tech Survey, 2025 (n = 914), to examine how sustainability is evolving across the executive agenda. It highlights strong technology spending momentum across the C-suite, creating favorable conditions for sustainability-related investments, while revealing alignment gaps between CSOs and other executives. The research shows sustainability shifting from compliance and cost efficiency toward operational integration, supply chain transformation, carbon measurement, and data security. It also underscores the growing urgency among CSOs for technology-enabled transformation and the need for integrated, outcome-driven platforms that deliver measurable business impact.

NVIDIA GTC 2026: NVIDIA's AI Factory Shift

Matthew Eastwood, Brandon Hoff, Jeff Janukowicz, Dave McCarthy, Ashish Nadkarni — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At GTC 2026 in San Jose, NVIDIA highlighted a new phase in the evolution of AI infrastructure centered on AI factories, inference economics, and the expansion of AI into agentic and physical domains. Keynote and event announcements showcased rack-scale systems, integrated networking and software platforms, infrastructure optimized for token generation, and frameworks supporting multimodel agents, robotics, autonomous systems, and edge AI. IDC notes that these developments reflect a broader structural shift: AI infrastructure is evolving from accelerator-centric deployments into integrated production environments designed to support continuous inference, higher-level AI services, and application-driven outcomes across cloud, enterprise, sovereign, and industrial markets.

AWS and Cerebras Collaborate on Disaggregated AI Inference to Challenge NVIDIA

Dave McCarthy, Brandon Hoff — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The partnership between AWS and Cerebras integrates Cerebras' massive CS-3 systems directly into AWS datacenters, coupling them with Amazon's proprietary Trainium3 AI chips to power a new, ultrafast generative AI inference service accessible through Amazon Bedrock.