Tape remains the storage medium of choice for long-term backups in data centres because it is cheap and durable, even though it is slower than SSDs and hard disks. Magnetic tape storage can cost as little as one quarter that of hard disks, and even less against SSDs, making it well suited to cold data that is rarely accessed but must be kept safe. Fujifilm's current 30TB Ultrium10 cartridge holds up to 75TB compressed and sells for £297.99 ex VAT in the UK.

The company says demand is expanding particularly among major cloud providers and data centre operators, which need to store the enormous volumes of data generated by AI training and inference securely and efficiently. Tape has a second advantage here: cartridges can sit entirely offline, out of reach of ransomware and other cyberattacks unless someone physically steals them.

The scale of the spend is notable. Fujifilm describes it as the largest investment it has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities; Tom's Hardware characterises it as the biggest in tape-based storage for around 20 years. The LTO roadmap itself stretches well beyond today's cartridges, allowing capacities up to 365TB per tape. Fujifilm is not alone in chasing the AI storage boom: Toshiba recently announced plans to double hard disk production capacity, while Kioxia and SanDisk have detailed denser 3D NAND flash for data centre SSDs.