Thanks, AI: Despite their origins in the early days of computing and digital media, magnetic tapes have never completely disappeared from the market. In fact, demand for data storage is so high right now that tape manufacturers are investing millions to expand their production capacity.
Fujifilm recently announced a significant new investment in its magnetic tape manufacturing operations. The Japanese giant will spend 10 billion yen, or around $64 million, to expand production capacity at its Kanagawa Factory in the city of Odawara. The site manufactures magnetic tapes for data storage workloads, and the IT world is certainly in desperate need of cheap, reliable storage these days.
The new investment will run from fiscal year 2026 through 2028, Fujifilm said. The company will use the newly allocated funds to expand Kanagawa's manufacturing facilities, with new positions expected to open as well. Fujifilm explained that magnetic tape is increasingly being used by cloud providers and data center operators, which is why the company needs to increase its manufacturing output to around five times its current level to better meet market demand.
Needless to say, Fujifilm is citing generative AI and other AI-related services as major drivers behind the growing demand for magnetic tape. The massive amounts of digital data collected by AI companies – for both model training and inference workloads – need a safe place to be stored. Magnetic tapes can hold enormous amounts of data and preserve it for long periods without requiring the significant financial investment associated with SSDs and other modern storage solutions.
Fujifilm's Kanagawa plant will focus on manufacturing the company's version of LTO-10 tapes, based on the LTO Ultrium standard. The LTO format was designed in the 1990s as an open-standard alternative to proprietary tape formats and is managed by a consortium of IT companies, including HPE, IBM, and Quantum Corporation.
LTO-10 tapes were released earlier this year, providing a native capacity of 40 terabytes. With compression, a single LTO-10 tape can store up to 100 TB. The transfer rate is 400 megabytes per second in either case, which shouldn't be an issue considering the "cold" storage workloads for which magnetic tapes are typically used.
Furthermore, the LTO consortium is already planning the next upgrades to its tape technology. The LTO-11 format is expected to arrive in 2029, offering a native capacity of 70 TB. Future plans include tapes capable of storing 120 TB (LTO-12), 210 TB (LTO-13), and even 365 TB (LTO-14) of uncompressed data on a single cartridge. That's frankly an outrageous amount of storage, no matter how you look at it.
Fujifilm also highlighted the company's long history with magnetic tape products. Its initial research efforts began in the 1950s and continued to evolve in response to new formats, including broadcast and consumer videotape systems. Fujifilm launched its first LTO-based product, the LTO Ultrium 1, in 2000, while the latest LTO Ultrium 10 format was introduced just a year ago.