In today’s AI-driven world, magnetic tape storage is apparently making a comeback. Seriously. And it has AI to thank for its resurgence.

As reported by Project Counsel Media (The growth of AI has led to a rise in demand for, of all things, magnetic tape storage, written by Casey Newton and Alexander Dumont and available here), market leader Fujifilm recently announced a ¥10 billion ($63 million) investment to quintuple its magnetic tape production capacity by 2028 at its Odawara plant, specifically focusing on advanced, ultra-high-capacity LTO-10 cartridges that can hold up to 100TB of compressed data.

Fujifilm’s work with magnetic tape as a data storage medium dates back to the 1950s, and in 2000, the company released its first LTO Ultrium storage tape.

As the authors note, global data generation is projected to reach roughly 718 zettabytes by 2030, forcing data centers to find a sustainable way to store the massive datasets required to train large language models.

They also note that mainstream consumers may have abandoned tape decades ago, but the enterprise world never did. Cloud giants rely on tape to back up vast troves of data. Agreed. Magnetic tape storage was never dead, but it is apparently more alive than ever – thanks to AI.

Newton and Dumont cover the announcement referenced above but also identify three critical advantages to tape that makes it as important as ever. One of those is:

Zero-Power Idle Efficiency: Unlike hard drives and SSDs that must stay powered and cooled in server racks, a magnetic tape cartridge consumes absolutely zero electricity when it sits on a shelf or inside an automated tape library. This drastically minimizes the carbon footprint and operational power strains currently choking modern AI data centers.

Which, as I noted in my previous post, may be choking us – eventually.

They identify two other advantages, which you can check out their report to see.

So, what do you think? Does your organization still use magnetic tape storage? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using ChatGPT, using the term “robot IT professional mounting a tape in a data center”.

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