Fujifilm has decided to invest approximately 10 billion yen, about 64 million dollars, at its Kanagawa Factory Odawara site to increase production capacity for data storage magnetic tape by approximately five times, the company announced on October 29 in Tokyo. The investment runs from fiscal 2026 through fiscal 2028, expands manufacturing facilities mainly for its latest generation LTO Ultrium 10 tape, and adds personnel. Fujifilm said it is the largest investment it has made to date in dedicated LTO facilities.
The company tied the decision directly to AI. The rapid spread of generative AI and cloud services is driving exponential growth in data volumes, Fujifilm said, and tape use is expanding particularly among major cloud service providers and data centre operators, with tape’s physical isolation from networks also drawing attention as protection against ransomware.
The expansion follows a weak year for the format. The Register reported that LTO cartridge shipments fell in 2025 to 160.3 exabytes from a record 176.5 exabytes in 2024, which the LTO Program attributed to difficult macroeconomic conditions, while noting sales picked up strongly in the second half and predicting record sales in 2026. LTO 10 cartridges hold 30 or 40 terabytes natively and transfer data at 400 megabytes per second, per The Register’s account of the format.
Fujifilm, which launched its first LTO tape in 2000 and says it holds the top global share of the magnetic tape market, is therefore building capacity against a forecast, not a current record. The bet is that the data AI generates has to be kept somewhere cheap, offline and durable, and that somewhere is tape.