Needless to say, Fujifilm is citing generative AI and other AI-related services as major drivers behind the growing demand for magnetic tape
LTO-10 tapes were released earlier this year, providing a native capacity of 40 terabytes.
2026 is wild.
Is $64m even an investment in the context of AI components? That just feels like the price of 64GB of RAM.
Wouldn’t magnetic tape be the wrong storage medium for generative models?
Or is this some type of non-archival iteration?
The Internet isn’t static or ‘forever’ like people like to joke. AI companies are slurping up data and they need somewhere to keep it. Hard drives are already increasing in price and they still need to store long term things like all the books they are destroying.
I don’t get it, why bother archiving anything AI produces? You can just ask the next AI to reproduce it.
This is likely for archiving the Internet before AI flooded it with slop.
This feels like a brain dead comment.
Why bother archiving anything when a computer can produce it?
Because sometimes it’s faster or cheaper to compute something and store the result then to recompute it every time. Nothing about AI changes that or is special in any way shape or form.
Okay, no need to name call. Tapes are for long term archiving. The access speed is minutes to hours, so these are definitely not for caching.
As some comments here have pointed out, it’s probably more like data that goes into the training corpus.
I’d also suggest that some demand won’t be from AI companies, but rather from other consumers of data storage, even if a boom in AI-driven spending is at the root of things. Like, maybe your ideal storage medium is SSD, but AI-related demand has driven prices up to 5x what they were earlier. Okay, so some users get priced out and fall back to rotational drives, because those are good enough for their use case. Prices on those go up by 2x. Well, the next fallback for some of those users who get priced out, who maybe used hard drives to store backups, say, is gonna be magnetic tape storage.
I buy the follow on effects rational, but I’m not convinced that tapes are a suitable alternative to HDDs. The random IO basically doesnt exist. But I guess if there are companies using HDDs for “cold” storage then using tape makes some sense for them.
My personal theory for this announcement is that its pure stock price manipulation. AI investing is full on fomo driven, so announce that your company is investing in X that will help AI, and watch the chuds hit buy in robinhood.
Archival of everything being scraped before its pushed off the internet and replaced with AI produced garbage.
The ship has sailed on the front. But even if its for the corpus of training data, surely that can’t be stored on tape, the access time would be way too slow.
It’s purpose is archival, not access. Tape density, cost, and reliability is much better than other mediums for that purpose.
Thats exactly my point, why bother archiving when you need it accessible for training? Surely they would be putting the training data on a faster medium.
Because you need a backup.
True in general, but I am not convinced its true for OpenAI or anthropic.
Their training data is probably already replicated across multiple datacenters, so tape archiving is less critical. And if tape archiving is critical, then surely they already have sufficient backups already right? And its not like the organic content of the internet is growing anymore, so there isn’t going to be an explosion of new organic data they need to store.
So I don’t buy that they need this. I think this is fujifilm trying to get in on the bubble, and nothing more.
They don’t need to archive AI output silly, they need to archive the cumulative works of the internet because they keep forcing hosts to shut down with what are among the most aggresive web-crawlers ever deployed outside of DoS attacks.
But thats pointless archiving it on tape, the access time is going to handicap the training speed.
They are going to have more than one drive, obviously. And 400 MB/s is nothing to scoff at.
