Fujifilm to Raise Data Tape Capacity Fivefold as AI Drives Archiving Demand

The company measures the fivefold target against its shipment capacity in fiscal 2025. It will add manufacturing equipment and staff, with most of the new capacity going to its latest-generation LTO (Linear Tape-Open) cartridges. Fujifilm called the programme "the largest investment Fujifilm has made to date in dedicated facilities for LTO tape."

The company gave the spread of generative AI and cloud services as the reason, saying both are driving demand to archive large volumes of data. Its statement also pointed to tape's low cost for long-term storage. Because tape can be kept off the network, it said, it also provides protection against ransomware.

Blocks & Files, a storage industry publication, put the investment at about $63 million and attributed the fivefold figure to an earlier Nikkei Asia report.

A Rebound After a Weak Year

The expansion comes after an unsteady period for the tape market. The Next Web, citing LTO Program figures first reported by The Register, said LTO shipments fell 9% in 2025 to 160.3 exabytes, down from a record 176.5 exabytes in 2024. Shipments then rose 57% in the first quarter of 2026 from a year earlier. Blocks & Files tied that jump to the arrival of LTO-10 cartridges and to demand for archiving more data, including AI training data.

The current LTO-10 format holds 40TB of uncompressed data per cartridge, according to Blocks & Files, and a future LTO-11 generation is expected to reach up to 70TB. Fujifilm launched its LTO Ultrium10 cartridge in 2025. The company says it uses magnetic particles that combine barium ferrite and strontium ferrite. Fujifilm says it was the first to commercialise barium ferrite for magnetic tape, in 2011, and that it holds the largest share of the global magnetic tape market. The market share figure is the company's own estimate.

Why It Matters

The AI build-out is creating demand well beyond GPUs. Memory chipmakers are already giving priority to data centres over phone and PC makers, and archival storage is now feeling similar pressure. Training datasets, model checkpoints and logs pile up quickly, and most of that data is rarely read again once written. Keeping it on hard drives or flash is expensive. Blocks & Files argued that tape is currently the only practical medium with a low enough cost per terabyte for this kind of cold data. It said alternatives such as holographic, ceramic-on-glass and DNA storage are still years away from commercial scale.

If the Nikkei report is accurate, Blocks & Files said, Sony, the only other maker of LTO media, may also increase output. Makers of tape libraries such as Quantum and Spectra Logic could see more orders, including from the newer cloud providers that specialise in AI computing.

Some caveats apply. The target is measured from fiscal 2025, a weak year for shipments, and the full capacity will not be available until the end of fiscal 2028. Fujifilm has not said how much of the extra output is already committed to customers.