Fujifilm commits 10 billion yen to fivefold tape capacity as AI drives archiving demand

Fujifilm is committing approximately 10 billion yen to magnetic-tape manufacturing, aiming to lift shipment capacity to about five times its fiscal 2025 level. The October 29 announcement ties the investment to growing archiving demand from generative AI—a push to store the data accumulating around AI systems, rather than add computing power to run them.

The spending, equivalent to about $63 million, will go to Fujifilm’s Kanagawa Factory at its Odawara site. The project covers fiscal 2026 through fiscal 2028, funding both larger manufacturing facilities and additional personnel.

More supply, not five times the capacity per cartridge

The fivefold target has a specific baseline: Fujifilm measures it by shipment capacity against fiscal 2025. It describes the scale of the planned supply expansion, not a fivefold increase in how much data an individual cartridge holds. The manufacturing work will primarily support FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10, its latest generation of data-storage tape.

Fujifilm calls this its largest investment to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities. The company’s stated goal is a more stable supply for customers as archiving needs grow.

The case for storage that can go offline

The company points to two properties of magnetic tape: it can hold large amounts of data over long periods at low cost, and it can be physically isolated from networks. Fujifilm says adoption has been expanding particularly among major cloud service providers and data-center operators.

Physical isolation is also central to its security argument. An air gap means separating the storage medium from the network, rather than leaving it connected. Fujifilm says increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks are drawing attention to tape as a way to protect data from threats such as ransomware.

An existing tape generation gets a larger factory base

The product receiving most of the new manufacturing support arrived in 2025. LTO Ultrium10 uses what Fujifilm calls fine hybrid magnetic particles, combining technologies developed for barium ferrite and strontium ferrite. These are magnetic materials used to record data on tape. Fujifilm says the combination enables smaller particles and improved magnetic properties for high-density recording.