Fujifilm Plans Fivefold Increase in Magnetic Tape Production

Fujifilm plans to quintuple its production capacity for magnetic tapes to meet demand fueled by the AI industry, according to a report by Nikkei citing unnamed sources. The expansion would be the largest in about 20 years and highlights how AI infrastructure growth is transforming the IT industry. The company reportedly plans to invest 10 billion yen, about 57 million euros, by fiscal year 2028, mainly to ramp up tapes with a compressed capacity of up to 100 TByte, or 40 TByte native.

AI Drives Tape Demand

LTO tapes offer enormous capacity and, in certain niches, outperform hard drives and SSDs because of low cost and long durability. The AI boom has recently led to strong growth in shipped capacity. Tape, once seen as an obsolete medium, has rapidly become more relevant because AI applications consume huge amounts of training data and companies seek cost-effective, energy-efficient long-term archiving.

Cost and Energy Advantages

In standby, tape drives use practically no power, and archiving costs have long been significantly lower than with hard drives, and even lower than with more expensive SSDs. The AI-fueled storage crisis has recently increased that cost advantage. Offline tape archives can also help protect data from cyberattacks such as ransomware.

Alternative Archiving Research

The move comes amid intense research into new long-term archiving alternatives. Microsoft is researching Project Silica, while Cerabyte burns patterns onto ceramic-coated glass plates, SPhotonix uses 3D voxels in quartz glass, and Piql and DigiFilm write patterns onto film reels. Many researchers are also working on DNA as a long-term data storage medium.

Sources: Heise Online · Techmeme