The growth of AI has led to a rise in demand for, of all things, magnetic tape storage

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It sounds like a tech paradox, but generative AI infrastructure is fueling a massive resurgence in magnetic tape storage. Global data generation is projected to reach roughly 718 zettabytes by 2030, forcing data centers to find a sustainable way to store the massive datasets required to train large language models.

Market leader Fujifilm recently announced a ¥10 billion ($63 million) investment to quintuple its magnetic tape production capacity by 2028 at its Odawara plant, specifically focusing on advanced, ultra-high-capacity LTO-10 cartridges that can hold up to 100TB of compressed data.

The "old-school" technology has become vital to the modern AI ecosystem due to three critical advantages. See the postscript to our main article.

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BY:

Casey Newton

Attorney

Legal Affairs Reporter

Alexander Dumont

Legal Technology Reporter

Members of the Project Counsel Media team

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2 November 2026 (New York, NY) - In an announcement last week, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly ¥10bn (about $63m) 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.

The full story can be accessed here.

Huh. Can we get back to punch cards if we really try hard enough? They survive a long time in an archive.

The "old-school" technology has become vital to the modern AI ecosystem due to three critical advantages.

1. Striking Cost Discrepancies

AI workloads create massive amounts of "cold data"—information like completed training runs, historical inference logs, and compliance audits that must be kept long-term but are rarely accessed:

• Per-Gigabyte Cost: Tape storage costs roughly 1 cent per GB, compared to 3–3.5 cents per GB for raw hard-disk drives (HDDs). Storing 100TB costs $1,000 on tape versus up to $3,500 on HDDs.

• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Industry metrics from the LTO Program show that tape users experience an 86% lower TCO than traditional disk storage and a 66% lower TCO over a 10-year period compared to cloud archival tiers.

2. Zero-Power Idle Efficiency

Unlike hard drives and SSDs that must stay powered and cooled in server racks, a magnetic tape cartridge consumes absolutely zero electricity when it sits on a shelf or inside an automated tape library. This drastically minimizes the carbon footprint and operational power strains currently choking modern AI data centers.

3. Bulletproof Cybersecurity

The rise of sophisticated, AI-driven ransomware has made physical security paramount. Tape allows organizations to "air-gap" their data. Because the cartridges can be completely disconnected from the network and stored physically offline, they provide an immutable, un-hackable baseline recovery system if a cloud environment is compromised.

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