Fujifilm plans five‑fold increase in magnetic‑tape output as AI fuels need for offline backups

Fujifilm said it will dramatically expand its magnetic‑tape manufacturing capacity, targeting a five‑fold rise in output by the close of fiscal 2028. The Japanese company is committing about ¥10 billion (approximately $63 million) to its Odawara facility to meet the growing demand from artificial‑intelligence workloads that produce petabytes of data each day.

This step mirrors a wider industry shift in which older storage formats are regaining importance. Although solid‑state drives and cloud platforms dominate most corporate settings, massive AI training and inference tasks often call for inexpensive, high‑capacity archival solutions. Magnetic tape, offering a low cost per gigabyte and a long‑term shelf life, provides a viable way to keep enormous data sets offline.

Security factors are also driving interest in tape. Because physical tapes are not constantly linked to networks, they are largely immune to remote ransomware and hacking attacks that target online storage. Organizations looking to broaden their data‑protection tactics view offline tape copies as a defense against cyber‑threats that could jeopardize cloud or on‑premise servers.

Already a top supplier of data‑storage tape, Fujifilm explained that the expansion will feature new production lines, upgraded automation, and added quality‑control procedures. The firm expects the added capacity to serve not only AI research labs and major tech firms but also media archives, government bodies, and scientific institutions that need dependable long‑term preservation.

Analysts point out that the timing coincides with an anticipated surge in AI‑generated data, which could double worldwide data volumes within the next ten years. As companies confront the cost and energy burdens of storing such amounts, tape’s low power draw and modest environmental impact make it an appealing alternative to continuously powered disk arrays.

Fujifilm’s investment underscores confidence that magnetic tape will stay a crucial element of the data‑storage landscape, even as newer technologies appear. The company intends to watch market reactions closely and may further tweak production if demand speeds up, positioning itself as a leading player in the evolving arena of secure, high‑capacity data archiving.