Fujifilm to expand LTO tape production capacity fivefold

Fujifilm announced on Thursday that it will invest roughly 10 billion yen, or about $63 million, to increase its production capacity for Linear Tape-Open products by five times. The company plans to spend this amount over the next two years to expand a tape plant in Odawara, Japan. This investment project at the Kanagawa Factory will run from fiscal years 2026 through 2028. The expansion will be measured against fiscal year 2025 production levels and represents the largest investment Fujifilm has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities.

The investment will focus on building more tenth-generation LTO tapes with native storage capacities of 30TB or 40TB. Fujifilm attributes the decision to the rapid spread of generative AI and cloud services driving exponential data growth. The company states that major cloud service and data center operators are expanding their use of magnetic tape to store large data volumes at relatively low cost. Magnetic tape is also attracting attention as a means to protect data from threats such as ransomware due to its ability to be air-gapped.

LTO is the sole surviving non-proprietary tape format kept alive by HPE, IBM, and Quantum Corp. Fujifilm debuted the LTO Ultrium10 in 2025, which is the first storage solution in the medium to use fine hybrid magnetic particles. LTO-10 devices can only read the current generation of tapes, ending the practice of drives reading past generations. LTO 11 is due in about 2029 and will reach 70TB capacity, while version 14 of the LTO format will jump to 365TB per cartridge.