Seagate's Derry plant set to become the world's largest laser manufacturer by 2028

A hard drive maker's nanophotonics push is on track to outscale East Asian laser producers within 18 months.

Seagate's Springtown facility in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, is on course to become the world's largest producer of semiconductor lasers by volume within roughly 18 months, according to evidence given to the UK's Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. The plant already leads laser production in Europe and currently manufactures between one-fifth and one-quarter of all the recording heads used in Seagate's hard disk drives worldwide.

The driver is heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), a technology that embeds nanoscale lasers directly into hard drive read/write heads. Briefly heating a tiny spot on the disk surface during writing lets data be packed at much higher densities than conventional recording allows — an advantage that matters as AI workloads push demand for higher-capacity, more energy-efficient storage. The capability traces back to a £115 million R&D investment announced in September 2025, which Invest NI has called one of the largest such projects it has ever secured for Northern Ireland, and which has already generated at least 30 new skilled jobs at the site.

"It is currently the biggest producer of lasers in Europe and will be, within about 18 months, the largest producer of lasers by volume in the world." — Sam Turner, CEO, Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre, Queen's University Belfast

What stands out here for the photonics community is less the hard drive story than the manufacturing story underneath it. HAMR requires fabricating and aligning lasers at nanometer scale and integrating them reliably into a high-volume commercial product — one of the more demanding precision photonics challenges being run at industrial scale today, and it's happening in Northern Ireland rather than the East Asian hubs that have historically dominated laser manufacturing. With Seagate reporting close to $1 billion in free cash flow last quarter and citing AI-driven storage demand as a structural growth driver, the Derry plant's laser output looks set to keep scaling alongside the broader AI infrastructure buildout.

Whether other hard drive makers (Western Digital, Toshiba) pursue comparable nanoscale laser integration, and how that affects the broader photonics supply chain

Follow-on investment or expansion announcements tied to Northern Ireland's positioning as a photonics center of excellence