AI boom fuels tape storage: Fujifilm invests $64 million to expand LTO-10 tape production
Fujifilm plans to invest $64 million between fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2028 to expand its Odawara plant in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, raising tape production capacity to roughly five times the current level to meet growing demand from cloud service providers, data centers and enterprise customers. The expansion focuses on LTO-10 tape, which offers 40TB native capacity per cartridge and up to 100TB compressed, with a transfer speed of 400MB per second. The massive long-term archiving needs created by generative AI, combined with tape's ability to be physically isolated to reduce ransomware risk, have brought the technology back into the spotlight.
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According to the plan, Fujifilm will expand production capacity at its factory in Odawara, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, during the fiscal years 2026 to 2028. The company expects that once the expansion is complete, the relevant production capacity will increase to about five times the current level, in order to meet continuously growing order demand from cloud service providers, data center operators, and enterprise customers.
In recent years, the rapid spread of generative artificial intelligence has generated massive amounts of data through large-model training and inference. Although high-performance solid-state drives and hard disk systems handle data processing tasks, tape still has clear advantages for data that needs to be stored long term. Its storage cost per unit is lower, its energy consumption is smaller, and it is suitable for long-term archiving, so it has regained attention from the technology industry.
The focus of Fujifilm's capacity expansion is the latest generation LTO-10 tape. As the current mainstream tape storage standard in the industry, LTO technology was initially promoted and developed jointly by companies such as IBM, HPE, and Quantum, aiming to provide a unified and open solution for enterprise-level data archiving.
The newly released LTO-10 single tape cartridge has a native capacity of up to 40TB, can store up to 100TB of data under data compression, and also offers a data transfer speed of 400MB per second. Although this performance is difficult to compare with modern solid-state storage devices, it is sufficient for backup and cold data archiving scenarios.
In addition to cost advantages, tape has also regained importance because of cybersecurity needs. Because tape can be completely disconnected from the network and stored in physical isolation, it can effectively reduce the risk of data loss caused by ransomware and other cyberattacks. This keeps it important among financial institutions, scientific research organizations, and large cloud service providers.
Industry insiders point out that as the scale of artificial intelligence models continues to expand and demand for data storage grows rapidly, enterprises are reassessing the long-term costs of various storage solutions. With its characteristics of large capacity, low energy consumption, and high reliability, tape has once again become an important part of data center infrastructure.
In the coming years, tape technology will continue to evolve. According to the industry roadmap, the next-generation LTO-11 standard is expected to further increase storage density and single-cartridge capacity, providing more storage space for the ever-expanding data world.
On the surface, artificial intelligence is driving the development of advanced GPUs, data centers, and high-performance servers; but at the other end of the industrial chain, this wave is also giving new life to tape storage technology, which has a history of decades. As the volume of global data continues to surge, this technology, once considered to be gradually exiting the mainstream stage, is ushering in a new golden age.