Fujifilm will boost magnetic tape output 5x as AI piles up data

In an announcement released Thursday, Ars Technica reports, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen, about $63 million, to increase its tape production capacity fivefold. The increase is measured against fiscal year 2025 production levels.

The money goes to the Kanagawa Factory in Odawara, Japan. Fujifilm calls it the largest investment it has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities. LTO means Linear Tape-Open, a shared standard for data tape cartridges.

The project runs from fiscal 2026 through 2028. It pays for more manufacturing space and more staff, mainly to build the newest tape, the FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium 10.

Tom's Hardware, citing Nikkei Asia, adds that this is the company's biggest tape investment in about 20 years.

Generative AI, the kind that writes text and makes images, produces a lot of data. Fujifilm says it is driving "exponential growth" in the data the world needs to store. In plain words, the pile is getting bigger faster every year.

Much of that data is what engineers call cold data. It is information you must keep but rarely open, such as old training sets, logs and backups.

In real life Think of the boxes in your attic. You do not want them in your living room, but you would be upset if they burned. Cold data lives in the data center's attic, and tape is the cheapest attic around.

Tom's Hardware says tape is the go-to option for long-term backup in data centers. A data center is a huge building full of computers that run apps and AI.

The big picture: tape is slower than other storage, but it wins on price and durability.

• Cost: Tom's Hardware says tape can cost as little as one quarter of a hard disk, and less still compared with faster solid-state drives (SSDs).
• Speed: Tom's Hardware notes tape lags behind SSDs and hard disks on performance.
• Climate: The same outlet says research shows tape is less polluting than hard disks and SSDs.

Blocks and Files makes a sharper point. It says storing rarely used data on disk would be prohibitively expensive, and that tape is the only feasible low-cost option today. Newer ideas such as holographic storage are early, and DNA storage is further away still, it adds.

Fujifilm's own LTO-10 launch page gives more background on why the company thinks tape fits this moment.

• Step up: LTO-10 is the 10th generation of the standard, a 1.67x jump in capacity from LTO-9, which held 18TB uncompressed.
• Cost: Fujifilm says tape has lower initial costs than hard disk drives, based on the price per terabyte, with the advantage confirmed for storage volumes of 10 petabytes or more.
• Rules: laws that govern data storage require companies and research groups to keep large amounts of data safely for long periods.
• Growth: the page cites a 2022 estimate that the world's data would reach 175 zettabytes in 2025. A zettabyte is a billion terabytes.

Ars Technica adds that consumers dropped tape decades ago, but the business world never did. Cloud giants still lean on it to back up vast troves of data.

Here is a feature no flashy new drive can copy. A tape cartridge can be unplugged, carried away and kept in a drawer, a vault or a separate building.

Fujifilm calls this an air gap, meaning a copy that is physically cut off from every network. If a hacker cannot reach it through the internet, a hacker cannot lock it.

Fujifilm says this matters because of ransomware, which means software that locks a company's files and demands money. Ars Technica quotes the company saying tape is attracting more attention as a defense against such threats.

The catch: an offline copy only helps if someone remembers to make it, and to test that it can be read back.

Tom's Hardware says Fujifilm began working on magnetic tape in 1954, first for television broadcasting equipment. Ars Technica lists the later steps:

• 2000: Fujifilm released its first LTO Ultrium storage tape.
• 2011: it was the first to commercially produce tape using barium ferrite magnetic particles.
• 2025: it debuted LTO Ultrium 10, the first in this medium to use what it calls "fine hybrid magnetic particles."

The hybrid particles combine barium ferrite with strontium ferrite. The magnetic particles are what store the data, so smaller and better particles mean more data on the same tape.

The answer depends on the generation and on compression, which squeezes data so it takes less room. The sources do not agree on one figure, so here they are side by side.

• Tom's Hardware: the expansion lets Fujifilm make tapes of up to 100TB each, and the LTO roadmap allows up to 365TB per cartridge.
• Blocks and Files: LTO-10 has 40TB raw capacity, or 100TB at a 2.5 to 1 compression ratio. It expects LTO-11 to bring up to 70TB raw and 175TB compressed.
• Fujifilm's launch page: the original LTO-10 announcement listed a maximum of 75TB per cartridge.

Tom's Hardware says the biggest SSDs top out around 256TB and cost considerably more. Ars Technica says every generation of tape has increased capacity in a meaningful way.

No. Tom's Hardware says Fujifilm is far from alone in chasing the AI data center boom. Toshiba announced earlier this month that it plans to double hard disk production capacity amid shortages.

Kioxia and SanDisk detailed 332-layer 3D NAND flash in August, aimed at bigger SSDs for data centers. NAND is the memory chip type inside an SSD.

Tom's Hardware says demand for AI storage is at the heart of a global shortage with little sign of easing. Prices have jumped, and makers are shifting resources away from consumer products toward more lucrative business ones.

Blocks and Files adds a few market notes:

• Shipments: LTO tape shipments rose 57 percent in the first three months of 2026, it says, helped by LTO-10.
• Rival: Sony is the other LTO tape maker and might also raise output.
• Library makers: companies that build tape libraries, such as Quantum and Spectra Logic, could benefit.
• Newcomers: it mentions Cerabyte, a ceramic-on-glass storage startup, as a future rival.

• Prices: you will not buy a tape yourself, but cheap bulk storage keeps cloud backup plans affordable.
• Safety: offline copies are a real defense against ransomware, so ask whether your cloud provider keeps one.
• Shortages: the storage squeeze behind this news is the same one pushing up prices for drives and memory in consumer products.
• Your habits: the old rule of one copy offline still beats most fancy setups.