Fujifilm Plans Fivefold Tape Expansion as Generative AI Drives Archiving

Introduction

Magnetic tape, largely absent from consumer technology, is gaining renewed attention in enterprise storage as generative AI expands the amount of data companies need to retain. Fujifilm says it will invest roughly ¥10 billion, or about $63 million, to expand its Odawara site at the Kanagawa Factory. The project is scheduled to run from fiscal 2026 through fiscal 2028 and is expected to raise production capacity to five times its fiscal 2025 level, with the latest LTO Ultrium 10 as the main focus.

Key points

• A major capacity increase: Fujifilm describes the project as its largest investment so far in dedicated LTO tape facilities.
• AI is increasing archive requirements: The company says generative AI is contributing to exponential growth in global data needs.
• Cloud providers still rely on tape: Large cloud and data-center operators use it to preserve large volumes at comparatively low cost.
• Offline protection is a selling point: Cartridges can be removed from connected systems and stored in a drawer, vault, or separate facility, creating an air gap against ransomware.

Why tape still matters

Tape is not designed to compete with flash storage for frequent, low-latency access. Its appeal is different: high capacity, relatively low cost, and the ability to sit offline for long periods. Once a backup has been written, a cartridge can be physically removed from the system. That makes it harder for a network-borne attacker to encrypt or tamper with every available copy of an organization’s data.

Fujifilm has worked with magnetic tape since the 1950s and released its first LTO Ultrium storage tape in 2000. In 2025, it introduced LTO Ultrium 10, which uses what the company calls fine hybrid magnetic particles, combining barium ferrite and strontium ferrite technologies. Future LTO generations are expected to offer higher capacities, but the Gen 11 through Gen 14 figures cited in the source are consortium projections rather than products currently on the market.

Broader impact

The investment highlights an often-overlooked consequence of the AI infrastructure boom. More AI workloads mean more data to train on, back up, retain, and manage for operational or compliance reasons. Not all of that information needs to remain on expensive, high-performance storage. Some can move into a colder archival tier.

Tape will not replace online storage. Instead, it is likely to remain one layer in a hierarchy that also includes flash, hard drives, and cloud services. Frequently accessed information stays online, while less frequently needed data can be moved to a cheaper medium that is also easier to isolate physically. In that context, tape is becoming less a symbol of obsolete technology than a capacity and resilience tool for modern data centers.

Source: Ars Technica AI