Fujifilm to Invest 10 Billion Yen to Raise Tape Capacity Fivefold

FUJIFILM Corporation has decided to invest approximately 10 billion yen at its Kanagawa Factory, Odawara Site to increase production capacity for data storage magnetic tape by approximately five times, the company announced on October 29, 2026. The capacity increase is measured by shipment capacity compared with fiscal 2025.

The investment will be made from fiscal 2026 through fiscal 2028 and will fund expanded manufacturing facilities and additional personnel to strengthen the production structure. Fujifilm will expand the facilities primarily for its latest-generation FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10 data storage magnetic tape, and the company states the outlay is the largest investment it has made to date in dedicated facilities for LTO tape. The goal, according to the company, is to strengthen its stable supply system for magnetic tape in response to growing data archiving demand accompanying the spread of generative AI.

Demand Rationale and Market Position

Fujifilm states that the rapid spread of generative AI and cloud services is driving exponential growth in the volume of data generated worldwide. As a result, the company says, establishing environments in which the enormous amounts of data accumulated through AI training and inference, as well as the digitalization of business activities, can be stored and utilized securely and efficiently is becoming increasingly important to supporting the digital society. Magnetic tape can store large volumes of data over long periods at low cost and can be physically isolated from networks. Use of magnetic tape has been expanding in recent years, particularly among major cloud service providers and data center operators, according to the company, and given the sophistication of cyberattacks, tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware.

Fujifilm began research into magnetic tape in the 1950s and subsequently expanded the business in response to changing data recording and storage needs, including the launch of broadcast videotape and consumer high-definition videotape. Since launching the FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium1 data storage magnetic tape in 2000, the company has worked to improve tape performance through proprietary materials technologies and precision coating technologies. In 2011, Fujifilm became the first company in the world to commercialize Barium Ferrite magnetic particles for use in magnetic tape, a material whose high-density recording capability has served as a core technology supporting higher-capacity data storage tape. In 2025, the company launched LTO Ultrium10, which uses proprietary fine hybrid magnetic particles that combine nanoparticle design technologies for Barium Ferrite and Strontium Ferrite magnetic particles; the further reduction in particle size and enhanced magnetic properties enable high-density recording, according to Fujifilm. The company states that it currently holds the top global share of the magnetic tape market by producer share.

LTO Ultrium10 and the LTO Format

FUJIFILM North America Corporation separately announced U.S. availability of the FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium 10 40TB Data Cartridge on April 2, 2026. The cartridge is built on Fujifilm’s hybrid Barium Ferrite and Strontium Ferrite magnetic particles and aramid base film technologies, and it offers an expanded operational temperature and humidity range compared with prior LTO generations. Its published specifications are as follows:

“In this age of AI technology, user data volumes are exploding more than ever before and are of increasing value. Organizations need storage solutions that are both economically sustainable and operationally resilient,” Takuma Yano, General Manager, Data Storage Solutions at FUJIFILM North America Corporation, said in the April announcement. The U.S. availability covers organizations in media and entertainment, finance, hyperscale cloud, high performance computing research, healthcare, and other data-intensive sectors, and the cartridges read and write in current LTO-10 tape drive systems. Fujifilm describes tape as consuming no power at rest, reducing operational energy usage compared with storage media that may consume power around the clock, and characterizes offline, air-gapped storage as a defense against ransomware and other cyber threats.

LTO Ultrium is developed and continually enhanced by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE ), IBM and Quantum and promoted by the LTO Program as an open, licensed format. According to the LTO Program, the technology is currently in its 10th generation, with a twenty-five-year history, and LTO-10 specifications support tape cartridge storage with a compressed capacity of up to 100 TB. The newest LTO-10 tape drives support data transfer rates of up to 1200 MB/s using a new 32 GB interface, providing 3.6 terabytes of storage performance per hour per drive, assuming 2.5:1 compression. Tenth-generation LTO Ultrium drives do not support backward compatibility because of a redesign of the drive head that eliminates the need for initialization. Specifications up to the 7th generation supported writing back one generation and reading back two generations, while 8th- and 9th-generation drives write back and read back one generation. The format also offers write-once, read-many capabilities, drive-based encryption, and partitioning through the Linear Tape File System, which reserves a portion of a tape for indexing that tells the drive where on the tape a file is stored.