Fujifilm to Lift Tape Output 5x as AI Data Volumes Expand

Fujifilm plans to spend about 10 billion yen, roughly $63 million, to expand magnetic tape production capacity five times over, the company said Thursday. The increase will be measured against fiscal year 2025 output levels.

The funding goes to the Kanagawa Factory, Odawara site, and will cover manufacturing expansion and additional personnel. Fujifilm calls it the largest investment it has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities. Work runs across fiscal years 2026 through 2028 and will center on producing the FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10 tape, which debuted in 2025. It is the first storage product in the medium to use what the company describes as fine hybrid magnetic particles, combining barium ferrite with strontium ferrite technology.

Fujifilm ties the demand to generative AI, which it says is driving exponential growth in data needs worldwide. The company says major cloud service and data center operators have been expanding their use of magnetic tape because it stores large volumes at relatively low cost. Tape cartridges can be disconnected and stored in a drawer, vault or separate facility, and Fujifilm points to that air-gap capability as a defense against attacks such as ransomware. "Given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware," the company said.

The company's history with magnetic tape reaches back to the 1950s. It released its first LTO Ultrium storage tape in 2000, became the first to commercially produce tape with barium ferrite magnetic particles in 2011, and has raised compressed and uncompressed storage limits with each generation of tape, now at Gen 10.

Cloud providers store backup data on tape media, and mainstream consumers largely abandoned the format decades ago. The expansion project covers fiscal years 2026 through 2028.