What changed
Fujifilm will invest roughly 10 billion yen, or about $63 million, to increase production capacity at its Kanagawa Factory Odawara site fivefold from fiscal 2025 levels. The expansion will run from fiscal 2026 through 2028, primarily producing LTO Ultrium10 tape, and is Fujifilm’s largest investment in dedicated LTO facilities.
Why it matters
AI’s most visible infrastructure is made of chips and servers. Its quiet backup layer may be magnetic tape.
Cloud service and data-center operators are expanding tape use because it stores large volumes at relatively low cost. Cartridges can also be disconnected and air-gapped, keeping backup data offline when ransomware reaches connected systems.
That makes Fujifilm’s move more than a nostalgic return for an old format. It is a bet that the data created by generative AI will need a cheap, durable place to go after it leaves active systems. The company says AI is driving exponential growth in data needs, but demand, future prices and the final production volume remain unknown.
The practical test will be whether Fujifilm’s fivefold capacity increase, targeted chiefly at the LTO Ultrium10 generation introduced in 2025, can keep pace with that storage burden. For now, the investment signals that tape is still part of the modern cloud stack, especially when the safest backup is one that can be physically unplugged.
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