Our India engineering facility is helping us deliver smarter, more efficient HDD solutions that address evolving enterprise needs: Kaustubh Patkar, WD India

India is at a pivotal moment in its deep-tech journey, evolving from a large talent hub into a strategic engine powering global innovation in data storage infrastructure. Western Digital’s India engineering ecosystem is now one of the company’s most advanced engineering centres worldwide, contributing to global breakthroughs in materials, mechanics, and firmware that power the next generation of data storage. Kaustubh S Patkar, Country Head & Senior Director, Western Digital India & HDD Engineering talks about the global-first innovations conceived in India, the company’s key technology focus areas, and how it is approaching the AI-driven transformation of storage.

How is Western Digital India strengthening its role as a core innovation engine within the company’s global R&D network?
The India site is one of Western Digital’s big technology drivers playing an important role in company’s global innovation vision. Engineers from India have recently contributed to 36 invention disclosures, underscoring their importance to the company’s worldwide IP pipeline. Our employees in India drive architecture, development, testing, and validation, helping to deliver end-to-end products and shaping next-generation storage platforms. Our strong technical depth and cross-functional collaboration help the company stay ahead of evolving customer and industry needs.

To further strengthen our innovation culture, we have established structured programmes, from supporting first-time inventors to nurturing young engineers and encouraging greater participation from women in innovation initiatives. As a result, the number of female inventors in Western Digital’s patent programme grew by 88% from FY2020 to FY2024. These efforts reflect our belief that diverse perspectives lead to stronger technology outcomes. With this strong foundation, Western Digital India continues to emerge as a high-performance engineering centre, contributing ideas and innovations that will help define the company’s global future.

Can you highlight some breakthrough engineering or technology advancements that have been conceptualised or co-developed by the India team for global markets?
Bengaluru’s Engineering & Development centre is a hub for Western Digital’s global innovation engine, which is helping to shape the future of HDD technology. Integrated into a global network of seven R&D hubs backed by 300 plus PhDs and a portfolio of 4,500 patents, the India team continues to strengthen this ecosystem with dozens of innovation submissions.

Our local engineers are driving advancements, from pioneering OptiNAND implementations to enhancing controller architectures and developing foundational storage solutions for AI-workloads. Additionally, the team’s work in firmware algorithms, smarter caching technology, and efficient data-management frameworks for high-capacity drives helps customers accelerate workloads, reduce operating expenses, and extract greater value from their storage infrastructure.

Innovation is in our DNA, and the Bengaluru facility remains tightly integrated with Western Digital’s global roadmap, continuously helping the company deliver smarter, more efficient HDD solutions that address evolving enterprise needs.

What initiatives within the India tech centre are helping foster cross-functional collaboration, creativity, and deep-tech problem solving among engineers?
We do not treat innovation as a standalone effort. It’s ingrained in the mindset that runs through the organisation and our people. Our engineering and development facility plays a vital role in not only strengthening but also fostering this mindset by creating a supportive, collaborative environment where unconventional ideas are welcomed, guided, and turned into real outcomes.

One such initiative that has stood out is the ‘She Invents’ India Women Inventor Mentorship Programme, designed to help women technologists translate their ideas into patent filings through personalised guidance and dedicated support. This programme has resulted in an 88% increase in the number of women inventors between FY2020 and FY2024.

Complementing this focus on innovation, signature events like Patent Day 2025 and our Innovation Bazaar reinforce the importance of breakthrough thinking. Together, these efforts highlight Western Digital’s commitment to cultivating people and intellectual property and fostering a culture that thrives on collaboration. Through sustained mentorship, recognition, and continuous skill-building, the company is paving the way for a more inclusive, innovation-forward technology ecosystem.

What are the major technology focus areas for Western Digital today, especially with respect to next-generation HDD development and firmware intelligence?
Our technological agenda is anchored in delivering maximum customer value through dependable, high-performance and high-capacity storage designed for the AI data-driven world. At Western Digital, we continue to advance trusted innovations such as energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), UltraSMR, and helium sealing (HelioSeal), all technologies that give us an edge in capacity leadership and industry-leading efficiencies while helping ensure smooth integration for customers at scale.

To push beyond existing capacity boundaries, we have begun sampling our heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) drives with key hyperscale partners. This marks a significant milestone in our journey toward denser storage for the next wave of data growth. Collectively, this portfolio reflects our customer-first commitment to sustainable, future-ready innovation, solutions built to meet the rising demands for efficiency, performance, scale, and capacity across today’s most intensive data workloads.

How is Western Digital approaching the AI-driven transformation of storage, and what differentiates its AI strategy from other players in the industry?
When we look at AI, it’s not just a tool for efficiency but it is fundamentally transforming the way we design, build, and refine storage technologies. At Western Digital, our goal is to integrate AI as an active collaborator throughout the entire development lifecycle, from initial architecture to in-field performance insights, enabling continuous enhancement of our products.

By leveraging our proprietary datasets alongside domain-specific AI models, we can eliminate repetitive tasks, speed up critical decision cycles, and free our engineers to focus on high-impact innovation for our customers. AI doesn’t replace human expertise, it amplifies it. By working alongside our teams, AI helps us create smarter, more robust solutions that reinforce our long-term technological edge.

What does Western Digital envision as its long-term roadmap in the storage ecosystem, and how will the India engineering ecosystem contribute to this future?
At Western Digital, we focus on sustaining our leadership in delivering trusted, scalable, efficient HDD innovation optimised for our customers. We continue to advance technologies that will support the next wave of data-intensive applications across AI, hyperscale environments, enterprise systems, and emerging workloads.

By closely working with our customers and partners, and aligning our innovations with evolving customer requirements, we help to simplify deployment and enable smooth integration and capacity transitions within existing ecosystems. Backed by deep engineering expertise and a legacy of trusted performance, Western Digital remains committed to boosting efficiency, maximising performance, and driving the lowest total cost of ownership, ensuring HDDs continue to be a foundation of the global data landscape for the long term.

At Western Digital, we are delivering the purpose-built data storage solutions that make the entire AI revolution possible. Our differentiator is a system of three principles, beginning with our customer-centric innovation, optimisation, and storage offerings ideal for the AI era. The second principle underpins the quality and reliability of our products based on rigorous resilience engineered into every drive. Our final principle is the culture of excellence that pervades our organisation, from operations to innovation to customer interactions.