In an announcement released Thursday, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase its production capacity fivefold for an unlikely beneficiary of the AI era: magnetic tape.
Fujifilm attributes the surge in archiving demand to the spread of generative AI, which the company remarked is producing “exponential growth” in data needs worldwide. The 5x increase in production capacity will be measured against fiscal year 2025 production levels.
The investment in Fujifilm’s Kanagawa Factory, Odawara site will make it “the largest investment Fujifilm has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities.” The project will run from fiscal years 2026 through 2028 to fund manufacturing expansion and additional personnel, primarily to produce the latest-generation “FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10” tape.
Mainstream consumers may have abandoned tape decades ago, but the enterprise world never did. Cloud giants rely on tape to back up vast troves of data. 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, the company was the first to commercially produce tape with barium ferrite magnetic particles, and in 2025 it debuted the LTO Ultrium10, the first storage solution in the medium to use what the company calls “fine hybrid magnetic particles” by combining barium ferrite with strontium ferrite tech. Each generation of tape (currently Gen 10) has seen meaningful increases in both compressed and uncompressed storage limits.
According to Fujifilm, “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. Tape backups can be easily disconnected and stored in a drawer, a vault, or a separate facility. Fujifilm highlights the ability to air-gap tape cartridges as a last defense for user data: “Given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware.”
