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.
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.
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.
I’d love consumerish tape storage for cold backups. I don’t really need random IO for archival stuff.