Fujifilm is increasing LTO tape production by 5x through 2028, backed by a 10 billion yen ($63 million) capital commitment. The driver is AI. LLM training and inference pipelines are generating archival data at a scale that has worked its way down the entire storage stack: GPUs, then SSDs, then spinning hard drives, and now tape.
The production ramp targets LTO-10 (Ultrium10), the current generation of the Linear Tape-Open standard. Native capacities are 30 TB and 40 TB per cartridge, marketed as 75 TB and 100 TB at a 2.5:1 compression ratio. Sequential throughput hits 400 MB/s uncompressed. Fujifilm has manufactured magnetic tape since the 1950s and has been an LTO partner since the standard launched. The article is worth reading for the breakdown of how compression ratios interact with cold-storage economics at this scale.
Sony is not making a parallel bet. The company exited Blu-ray, MiniDV, and MD media production, closing off the optical path for high-density archival at datacenter scale. Tape automation systems, robotic tape libraries included, are filling that vacuum. The homelab community is already absorbing surplus LTO hardware. Fujifilm is betting the enterprise follows.
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