Seagate Tops Toshiba in Bidding for TDK's HDD Head Unit

TDK, the only independent maker of the magnetic-recording heads that write and read data on every spinning hard drive, is in play. Bloomberg reports that Seagate and Toshiba are bidding against each other for the unit, in a deal that could be worth several billion dollars.

Both bidders are already TDK customers. So is Western Digital, which is not at the table. Seagate and Western Digital each account for about 45% of HDD supply by bits; Toshiba holds roughly 10%.

Toshiba opened talks with TDK in the spring. Seagate came in later, over the summer, with a higher offer. Executives met in Tokyo to discuss "ensuring ongoing supply of heads, including a potential joint venture," per the reporting, and the talks are described as early and could still fall apart.

TDK's motive is portfolio-level. The company is redirecting resources toward batteries, passive components and sensors, with a push into "AI-enabled wearables such as smart glasses." The head unit's "volatility and thin margins" are cited as the reason it is being sold.

Any deal would likely draw antitrust review, with policymakers treating data-center storage capacity as part of economic security. That framing matters because the AI cold-storage buildout is the whole reason the two sides are fighting; Toshiba was separately reported to be seeking to roughly double its hard-disk drive manufacturing capacity for AI data centers by fiscal 2027. Whoever wins would end up selling a critical hard-drive component to a direct competitor.

It is another storage-side entry in a run of AI-infrastructure M&A we have been logging almost daily on the tracker.