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Fujifilm To Boost Tape Production 5x As AI Fuels Archiving Demand (arstechnica.com) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the unlikely-AI-beneficiary dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In an announcement released Thursday, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase its production capacity fivefold for an unlikely beneficiary of the AI era: magnetic tape. Fujifilm attributes the surge in archiving demand to the spread of generative AI, which the company remarked is producing "exponential growth" in data needs worldwide. The 5x increase in production capacity will be measured against fiscal year 2025 production levels.

The investment in Fujifilm's Kanagawa Factory, Odawara site will make it "the largest investment Fujifilm has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities." The project will run from fiscal years 2026 through 2028 to fund manufacturing expansion and additional personnel, primarily to produce the latest-generation "FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10" tape. [...]

According to Fujifilm, "major cloud service and data center operators" have been expanding their use of magnetic tape because it can store large data volumes at relatively low cost. Tape backups can be easily disconnected and stored in a drawer, a vault, or a separate facility. Fujifilm highlights the ability to air-gap tape cartridges as a last defense for user data: "Given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware."

Fujifilm To Boost Tape Production 5x As AI Fuels Archiving Demand More | Reply

Fujifilm To Boost Tape Production 5x As AI Fuels Archiving Demand

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  • AI is now writing realistic headlines.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dysmal ( 3361085 )

      I'm kinda ok with the typo because at least we know it's not AI. It made me do a double take and actually made me want to read more.

    • I read it as "boost" but whatever.

      A while ago I read something about how humans can miss typos in the middle of words, but less so if the typos are at the ends. Maybe with sentences too. There's the old joke that you should proofread to make sure you haven't any words out.

      • n prtclr y dnt nd vwls.
      • There's the old joke that you should proofread to make sure you haven't any words out.

        If I had $1 for every time AI has found a word missing in my work that I've proofread several times, I wouldn't need to work any more.
  • I am very impressed that Fujifilm has come up with a new process and a whole new word called "Bost" to help archiving demand

  • All your tape are belong to bost (Score:3)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:14PM (#66408136)

    Take off every zig!!!

  • Forget the datacenters, what about ordinary users (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:40PM (#66408176)
    Forget the datacenters, what about ordinary users? I still miss QIC-80 tapes. I had long since copied my 1990s QIC-80 tape backups to DVD-R and then NAS. Recently (well, 2020'ish), as my last motherboard with a floppy connector was about to go to the recycler I decided to connect a QIC-80 drive and seem how many of those old tapes were still readable. Out of 50 tapes only one was bad. And their last 5 years was sitting in a hot garage rather than a shelf inside the house.

    Some modern incarnation at a comparable price point would be a welcome improvement over external 2.5in USB drives.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Unfortunately sensitivity to degradation is an inherent disadvantage of density when it comes to magnetic and flash memory mediums beyond a certain point.

      It's like running an MLC SSD in SLC mode. It will remain readable far longer after being disconnected from power, because there's a much wider tolerance for voltage shift.

    • dvd -r is once again the cheapest storage medium. cost per gb wise.
      • Is a station wagon full of mag tapes still the highest bandwidth network?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Archfeld ( 6757 )

          Is a station wagon full of mag tapes still the highest bandwidth network?

          Yes, they just edged out a flight of pigeons....

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Archfeld ( 6757 )

      DLT with a chip for random access was what we were using when I retired.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dohzer ( 867770 )

      Forget the datacenters, what about ordinary users?

      Well good news, friend. Those AI datacentres are about to make your magnetic tapes 8 times more expensive and virtually impossible to source for ordinary users.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drnb ( 2434720 )

        Forget the datacenters, what about ordinary users?

        Well good news, friend. Those AI datacentres are about to make your magnetic tapes 8 times more expensive and virtually impossible to source for ordinary users.

        I expect datacenters and regular users would be using different tape. As we saw in the 90s with QIC-80 which was more a professional or small business thing.

    • OK, so immediate solution: you can get hotswap bays for 3.5" HDDs relatively cheaply at the moment ($20-30 on Newegg) "But a HDD costs $100s!" I pretend you ask. True, but those HDDs you take out of old computers you're about to scrap and have a pile of for "just in case" are free.

      But that said, if the AI industry crashes (it ought to, but what's that phrase about the market being irrational longer than you can stay solvent?), a nice benefit would be an oversupply of tape drives and tape media.

  • Even just for archiving, I would have thought tape would be too slow for the volume of data involved in AI farms. And don't tapes still occupy a lot more space than equivalent-capacity hard drives? Also, what about access times? I know it's just archiving, but still...

    • It could be for archiving the training data used for a model and not the model itself. If there's ever a major legal case involving an LLM then being able to show exactly what input was used in its construction would be very important. The data used to train a model doesn't need to be consulted too frequently once the training has been done. Since LLMs are starting to live outside of RAM now, it makes sense to kick the data that used to sit on disc out to tape.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

      Even just for archiving, I would have thought tape would be too slow for the volume of data involved in AI farms.

      LTO-9 writes at 300 megabytes per second for uncompressed data. So 2-3x of that for things like text. And unlike HDDs, this is sustained and constant. A tape library with 3-5 tape drives can easily saturate a 40G network.

      • Tape can be quite fast once data transfer happens. The problem is the "seek time" latency with tape, not only winding the tape to the location of the data, but actual tape retrieval and loading into the drive mechanism as well.

    • They have extremely high bandwidth and it scales cleanly with the number of drives. So backup systems are sized to move a LOT of data, it's like comparing throughput of a semi to a sedan. Even if your car is very fast, I can add one more trailer. Fanning out linear writes is incredibly efficient. Removable media lets us scale bandwidth and capacity independently. So there's no slow, you simply add drives until everything else is the bottleneck.

      Access time is usually not an issue with archival media, I mean

  • An old USENET cliche makes a comeback! (Score:3)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:50PM (#66408454)
    "I haven't lost my mind, I've got it backed up on tape!"
    • Hollywood: Brainstorm (1983), Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood (her last movie). Someone develops a brain recorder that puts experiences on tape. Someone records sex and psychotic episodes that generate brain damage in viewers who find the tapes and sneak a peek.

  • whatever happened to all those quarter sized petabyte holographic drives?

  • I quit using tapes when I could chuck an 8T bare sata drive into a caddy and use veeam to back up multiple systems til full, swap and repeat. It's way less expensive than tape. I get for enterprise environments needing immutability but as a defense against ransomware it doesn't seem very effective. The good ones (bad ones?) wait to present themselves until long after your backups have been recycled.

    • That's smaller than one tape cartridge? How do you compare a single hot swap hard drive to a tape system, it's an entirely different scale. The $ per TB is strongly in tape's favor.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sheph ( 955019 )
        For small business it doesn't really make sense. I see what you're saying for larger operations. My comparison at the time was DLT III vs bare drive. More space less cost in that scenario. Before that QIC-80 was pretty popular, but more than once I went to recover and ran into a bad tape. I ran into that recovering from DLT too. Just my personal experience. LTO may offer better cost per TB in tape, but when you start talking about the hardware to use the tape... $13k buys a lot of hard drives.

      • Depends entirely on the situation.

        I use a similar set up to the OPs because I have a ton of old HDDs lying around and a hotswap bay is $30. This is probably good enough for the majority of smaller businesses out there as long as they're frugal and keep the old drives hanging around. Two "large" capacity HDD, each big enough to do your regular non-incremental back-up, together with your existing pile of old HDDs for incrementals, is likely lower cost than an LTO set up.

        Hopefully that'll change if the AI indu

  • Somewhere the moans and cries of a thousand tape drives forced to store all those zero-effort Youtube/Instagram/TikTok AI slop videos could be heard, if the data centers around them were not even louder.

  • The drive is the razor, and the tape cartridges are the blades.

    When was involved in the design of tape libraries back in the late 90's and early 2000's, the cost of the tape cartridge was significant. The bulk of the cost was the license fees paid to the designers of the tape cartridges due to patents. Although it's been quite some time since then, I'm sure the same model holds. Heck, there could even be technical "genuine" tape cartridge authentication methods used (in the same manner as ink cartridges) a

  • CFO: Should we close down that old factory, not doing so well? CEO: Meh, just keep it, who knows, maybe this gets some LP enthusiasts kids interested.
  • You have to save it somewhere.
  • When I worked at Rocky Flats ETS we replaced racks of old IBM tape drives with a Storage Tek Powderhorn tape silo. We went from using 42 tape drives to 4 high density drives. Took half the time to back up the Vax cluster and then massive mainframe systems.
  • I wonder if you could spool that on a IBM 729?

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