Western Digital’s Shanghai manufacturing site engages in R&D, packaging and testing of advanced flash memory products. In the context of growing demand, the company doubled the site’s petabyte (PB) output between 2017 and 2021 while reducing its environmental footprint per PB to achieve corporate objectives.

This result was enabled by multiple Fourth Industrial Revolution use cases, such as machine learning to dynamically optimize the performance of the water recycling plant and consumption prediction to detect abnormal energy consumption based on real-time operating data.

These measures reduced water consumption by 62% and energy consumption by 51% per PB.