Fujifilm to boost tape production 5x as AI fuels archiving demand

Fujifilm said Thursday it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase magnetic tape production capacity fivefold against fiscal year 2025 levels, attributing rising archiving demand to the spread of generative AI. The expansion at the company's Kanagawa Factory, Odawara site will run from fiscal years 2026 through 2028 and is described as Fujifilm's largest investment to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities.

Production expansion

The project will fund manufacturing expansion and additional personnel, primarily to produce the latest-generation FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10 tape. Fujifilm says generative AI is producing "exponential growth" in data needs worldwide, and major cloud service and data center operators have been expanding their use of magnetic tape because it can store large data volumes at relatively low cost.

Why enterprises still use tape

Mainstream consumers may have abandoned tape decades ago, but the enterprise world never did, and cloud giants rely on tape to back up vast troves of data. Tape backups can be easily disconnected and stored in a drawer, a vault, or a separate facility, and Fujifilm highlights the ability to air-gap tape cartridges as a last defense for user data. The company says that given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware.

Fujifilm and LTO generations

Fujifilm's work with magnetic tape as a data storage medium dates back to the 1950s, and in 2000 the company released its first LTO Ultrium storage tape. In 2011, it was the first to commercially produce tape with barium ferrite magnetic particles, and in 2025 it debuted LTO Ultrium10, the first storage solution in the medium to use what it calls "fine hybrid magnetic particles" by combining barium ferrite with strontium ferrite technology. Each generation of tape, currently Gen 10, has seen meaningful increases in both compressed and uncompressed storage limits; Gen 11 through Gen 14 figures are consortium projections for the future.

Sources: Ars Technica