Toshiba starts nearline HDD output at expanded Laguna plant
Toshiba's Philippine manufacturing arm has begun building nearline hard drives at its Laguna Technopark site and shipped the first units as AI and cloud demand for data-centre storage keeps climbing.
Toshiba Information Equipment (Philippines) has started building nearline hard disk drives at its Laguna Technopark facility and shipped the first units off the newly expanded line, the company said on 2 October.
The plant had focused on HDDs for personal computers. Nearline drives are the high-capacity models that fill data-centre racks, and Toshiba says demand for them is climbing as AI and cloud workloads scale. The company is aiming to nearly double its annual production capacity by FY2027 compared with FY2025, measured on a storage-capacity basis.
Thirty years in Laguna
Toshiba Information Equipment (Philippines) opened on 1 October 1996 building 2.5-inch drives for desktop PCs, and added 1.8-inch production in 2001. Its 30th-anniversary ceremony in Manila drew around 250 guests, among them representatives of the Philippine government, suppliers, business partners and local community groups.
"The first shipment from our expanded nearline HDD production line marks an important milestone for TIP," said Kenichi Myokan, president and representative director of Toshiba Information Equipment (Philippines). "As the Toshiba Group's HDD manufacturing site, we will continue to support the data infrastructure required in the AI era while contributing to the development of the Philippine economy."
The company picked up the Billionaire's Award at the PEZA Excellence Awards for five straight years from 2019 to 2023, and added ISO 50001 certification for energy management in 2026. It will show off its manufacturing work at the PSECE 2026 exhibition in Pasay City from 26 to 28 October.
Our opinion
Spinning platters are the least fashionable part of the AI boom and one of the hardest to replace. Flash is faster and quieter, but nothing else gets to a 20TB-plus rack unit at a price cloud operators will actually pay per terabyte. Toshiba doubling capacity on a storage-capacity basis is the unglamorous half of the same story the GPU headlines tell, and it is the half that decides whether an archive tier stays affordable. The Philippines has been making Toshiba drives for three decades, so this is an expansion of an existing bet rather than a hedge — but it is a bet on nearline holding its ground against flash for a while yet.