Huawei's Xiao Degang: The second half of AI is data, which is a huge benefit for storage.

At Huawei China’s Partner Conference 2026, Xiao Degang, Vice President of Huawei’s Data Storage Product Line, stated that the second half of AI is data, which is a huge benefit for storage.
At the application layer, AI is penetrating various industries, driving agent specialization, requiring storage to fully evolve in “knowledge bases, memory banks, and data security”;
At the model layer, contextual information increases exponentially, and in the post-LLM era, world models become a frontier hotspot.
The growth in data volume will far surpass that of large language models, creating numerous opportunities for data storage and demanding extreme performance in capacity, bandwidth, and latency.
At the infrastructure layer, moving from a cost center to a profit center, storage needs to enhance computing power around the Token economy.
At the processor layer, shifting from CPU-centric to xPU-centric architectures, higher requirements are placed on storage for IO concurrency capabilities.
(Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily)