Fujifilm's 5x Tape Expansion: Why AI Is Reviving Magnetic Tape

By Jaspal Singh October 29, 2026 Updated: October 29, 2026

Fujifilm will spend about ¥10 billion (roughly $64 million) by fiscal 2028 to make about five times as much data storage tape as it did in fiscal 2025. The bet is that generative AI and cloud services are creating more data than disk alone can affordably keep, and that cheap, offline, ransomware-resistant tape is where much of it will end up.

What Happened

On October 29, 2026, Fujifilm said in a news release from its Tokyo headquarters that it will invest approximately 10 billion yen at its Kanagawa Factory Odawara Site between fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2028. The money pays for expanded manufacturing facilities and additional staff. Fujifilm says the result will be a production capacity for data storage magnetic tape roughly five times higher, measured by shipment capacity against fiscal 2025, and calls it its largest-ever investment in dedicated LTO tape facilities.

The expansion centres on the company's newest cartridge, FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10, which launched in 2025. Fujifilm's first LTO product, Ultrium1, went on sale in 2000, and the company says it has researched magnetic tape since the 1950s. It also claims the largest global share of the tape market by producer.

The Register's report on the announcement converts the yen figure to about $64 million, and Tom's Hardware described it as the largest investment in tape in about 20 years. Neither Fujifilm nor the reports give a month when the new lines start producing; the release only frames the spend across the three fiscal years.

The timing follows the LTO Program's own numbers. In its annual shipment report on September 1, 2026, the group run by HPE, IBM and Quantum said a record 176.5 exabytes of LTO tape capacity shipped in 2024, up 15.4 percent. Shipments fell 9 percent to 160.3 exabytes in 2025, which the program still called its second-best year, and then rose 57 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026. The program expects 2026 to set a new record.

Why It Matters

Most people never touch a tape cartridge, but a large share of the world's long-term data sits on one. Cloud archive tiers, film studios, research labs, banks and hospitals use tape for data they must keep for years and rarely read. When a manufacturer quintuples capacity, it is signalling that it expects those buyers, and the hyperscale cloud providers in particular, to need far more of it.

Three pressures are pushing in the same direction. The first is volume. Fujifilm's release ties the growth directly to generative AI and cloud services: training sets, model checkpoints, logs and the raw material collected for future training all pile up, and very little of it can be deleted. Keeping all of that on spinning disks or flash means paying for drives that sit idle most of the time.

The second is power. In the LTO Program's report, storage analyst Tom Coughlin points out that tape uses less power than any other storage medium. A cartridge on a shelf draws nothing at all. With data centre build-outs now limited by how much electricity operators can get, a medium that needs no power for most of its life becomes more attractive. We covered that constraint in our look at why power is becoming the next bottleneck for AI data centres.

The third is security. Fujifilm notes that tape can be physically separated from the network, and that is why it is drawing attention as a ransomware defence. Malware that encrypts every connected disk cannot reach a cartridge sitting in a vault or in an unmounted library slot.

There is also a supply angle. Solid-state storage is under its own pressure, as our report on the SK Hynix memory shortage that may last until 2030 explains. When flash is scarce and expensive, moving cold data off it and onto tape frees up capacity for the workloads that actually need speed.

How It Works

Modern data tape is a long, thin plastic film coated with magnetic particles, wound on a single reel inside a cartridge about the size of a paperback. A drive pulls the tape past a head assembly that writes many parallel tracks at once. When it reaches the end, it reverses and writes the next band of tracks going the other way. This back-and-forth pattern, called serpentine recording, is why a single cartridge can hold tens of terabytes.

Why the particles matter

Capacity depends on how small each magnetic bit can be while staying readable for decades. Fujifilm was the first company to commercialise barium ferrite particles for tape, in 2011. For LTO Ultrium10, it says it uses "fine hybrid magnetic particles" that combine barium ferrite and strontium ferrite. Smaller, more stable particles let engineers pack tracks closer together without the data fading.

What LTO-10 holds

LTO, short for Linear Tape-Open, is the open format most of the industry uses. According to The Register, the tenth generation launched with 30TB native cartridges, and a 40TB native cartridge followed in early 2026, readable in the same drives. The LTO Program's technology roadmap quotes up to 100TB per cartridge when data compresses at a 2.5:1 ratio. That headline number is why some coverage calls these "100TB tapes"; data that is already compressed, such as video or encrypted backups, will get close to the native figure instead.

The trade-off: speed of access

Tape streams data quickly once it is moving. The Register puts LTO-10 at around 400MB/s native, which is faster than many hard drives for long sequential reads. What tape cannot do is jump to a file instantly. A robot arm in a tape library has to fetch the cartridge, load it, and wind to the right spot, which takes from tens of seconds to minutes. That is fine for an archive or a disaster-recovery copy and useless for a database.

So tape rarely works alone. In a typical layout, hot data lives on flash, warm data on hard drives, and cold data on tape, with software moving files between tiers by age and access frequency. The familiar 3-2-1 rule, three copies on two kinds of media with one off-site, often uses tape for the second medium and the off-site copy. Our data backup and recovery guide walks through that rule for smaller setups.

A compatibility catch

Earlier LTO drives could usually read one or two older generations. The LTO Program says LTO-10 drops backward compatibility because a redesigned head removes the need for an initialisation step. Organisations moving to LTO-10 therefore have to keep older drives around, or migrate their archives, to read LTO-9 and earlier cartridges. That migration work is itself a source of new tape demand.

What's Still Unknown

Fujifilm has not said when the new Odawara capacity comes online, only that the spending runs through fiscal 2028. It has not published absolute production numbers either, so "five times" tells us the direction but not how many cartridges or exabytes that means.

Prices are another open question. More supply could ease cartridge costs, but if hyperscalers absorb most of the new output under long-term contracts, small businesses buying a few cartridges at a time may see little change. Neither Fujifilm nor the LTO Program has commented on pricing.

It is also unclear how much of the demand is truly new rather than replacement. Some of the 2026 rebound reflects the arrival of the 40TB cartridge and migrations away from older generations, which the shipment data does not separate out.

Finally, the roadmap beyond LTO-10 is a plan, not a product. The Register reports targets of about 70TB native for LTO-11, but past generations have slipped, and the capacity of future cartridges depends on media advances that have not shipped yet.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much is Fujifilm investing in tape production?

Fujifilm says it will invest approximately 10 billion yen, about $64 million at current rates, at its Kanagawa Factory Odawara Site in Japan. The spending runs from fiscal 2026 through fiscal 2028 and covers new manufacturing equipment and extra staff. The company describes it as its largest-ever investment in dedicated LTO tape facilities.

Is magnetic tape really still used in 2026?

Yes. The LTO Program reports that 160.3 exabytes of LTO tape capacity shipped in 2025 and 176.5 exabytes in 2024, a record. First-quarter 2026 shipments were 57 percent higher than a year earlier. Cloud providers, research institutions, media companies and enterprises use it mainly for archives and backup copies they rarely need to read.

Why does AI increase demand for tape storage?

AI projects generate and keep huge amounts of data, including training sets, model checkpoints, logs and collected material for future training. Much of it must be retained but is rarely accessed. Keeping that on powered disks or flash is expensive, so operators move it to tape, which costs less per terabyte and draws no power while a cartridge sits on a shelf.

How much data does an LTO-10 tape hold?

LTO-10 cartridges hold 30TB or 40TB of native, uncompressed data, according to The Register and the LTO Program. The roadmap quotes up to 100TB per cartridge assuming data compresses at 2.5:1. Video, photos and encrypted files barely compress, so for those the usable capacity is close to the native figure rather than the headline number.

Can an LTO-10 drive read older LTO-9 tapes?

No. The LTO Program says LTO-10 drives are not backward compatible, because a redesigned drive head removes the need for tape initialisation. Earlier generations could read one or two previous formats. Anyone upgrading should keep an older drive for existing cartridges or plan to copy their archive onto the new format before retiring old hardware.

Does tape protect against ransomware?

It can. A cartridge that has been ejected from a drive, or stored off-site, is physically disconnected from the network, so ransomware cannot encrypt or delete it. Fujifilm cites this as one reason tape is gaining attention. The protection only holds if copies are made regularly, checked for readability, and kept genuinely offline rather than permanently mounted.

Should a home user or small business buy a tape drive?

Usually not. LTO drives cost far more than external hard drives, and the savings only appear once you are storing tens or hundreds of terabytes. For most homes and small offices, a mix of external drives and a cloud backup service is cheaper and simpler. Tape makes sense when archives are very large and must be kept for years.