Tape is so not dead that Fujifilm will increase production capacity 5x

Japan’s Fujifilm has decided the tape market has so much upside that it needs to boost production of its Linear Tape-Open (LTO) products by five times.

LTO is the sole surviving non-proprietary tape format and is kept alive by HPE, IBM, and Quantum Corp, who head the LTO Program.

As The Register recently reported, shipments of LTO cartridges went backwards during 2025, when buyers shelled out for 160.3 exabytes worth of LTO compared to the record 176.5 exabytes; worth of tape cartridges sold in 2024.

The LTO program attributed the 2025 result to difficult macro-economic conditions, noted that sales picked up strongly in the second half of the year, and predicted record sales in 2026.

Fujifilm seems to agree with that optimistic outlook, as it today announced a plan to spend ¥10 billion ($64 million) over the next two years to expand a tape plant in the Japanese city of Odawara.

The company said AI has made this a sensible investment.

“The rapid spread of generative AI and cloud services is driving exponential growth in the volume of data generated worldwide,” the company’s statement reads. “As a result, establishing environments in which the enormous amounts of data accumulated through AI training and inference as well as the digitalization of business activities can be stored and utilized securely and efficiently is becoming increasingly important in supporting the digital society.”

Fujifilm says its investment will go towards building more tenth-gen LTO tapes, which come in variants that boast native storage capacity of either 30TB or 40TB, and transfer data at 400 MB/s. Many LTO users employ data compression to more than double the capacity of each tape cartridge. Decompressing data takes time, and shifting data off tape doesn't happen in a hurry. Tape users, however, nearly always use it for offline or nearline archives, and understand that access times are not the medium's strong point.

The LTO Program has already defined four more generations of its format and delivers updates about every four years. LTO 11 is therefore due in about 2029 and will reach 70TB capacity. Version 12 will climb to 120TB, before unlucky version 13 shoots up to 210TB. Version 14 will jump to 365TB per cartridge!

The LTO program used to insist that tape drives could read the current past generations of cartridges. That ended with LTO-10 devices, which can only read the current generation of tapes. ®