Fujifilm plans to invest approximately ¥10bn at its Kanagawa Factory’s Odawara site in Japan to expand data storage magnetic tape manufacture. The programme runs from fiscal 2026 through fiscal 2028 and aims to raise production capacity, measured by the amount of data storage the factory could ship, to approximately five times its fiscal 2025 level. Additional manufacturing equipment and personnel will principally support LTO Ultrium 10 media, as the company prepares for demand associated with long-term archiving of cloud and AI data.
The fivefold comparison is based on shipment capacity expressed in storage terms, so cartridge count alone would not capture the effect of higher-capacity generations. Fujifilm will expand manufacturing facilities and recruit staff as part of the Odawara programme, which it describes as its largest dedicated LTO tape facility investment. The eventual volume shipped will depend on manufacturing output, product mix and customer demand. New equipment will also need commissioning and quality qualification before it contributes consistently to the production system.
Magnetic data tape is manufactured by forming a thin recording layer containing magnetic particles on a flexible base film, using tightly controlled coating and finishing processes. Recording density depends on particle design, the uniformity of the coating, the physical stability of the tape and the precision of the read and write heads that access it. As the bits stored in a given length of tape become smaller, irregularities in the coating or dimensional behaviour become increasingly important. Enlarging manufacturing capacity therefore requires both more throughput and consistent performance at demanding material tolerances.
Fujifilm introduced barium ferrite magnetic particles for commercial data tape in 2011 and subsequently developed strontium ferrite technology. Its LTO Ultrium 10 media use fine hybrid magnetic particles drawing on both approaches, with particle size and magnetic performance contributing to recording density. Improvements in materials must work alongside coating precision, base-film stability and the performance of compatible tape drives. The Odawara investment extends a production system built around those interdependent manufacturing requirements.
Fujifilm’s LTO Ultrium 10 range includes a 30TB native cartridge introduced in 2025 and a later 40TB version made available in 2026. Stated maximum compressed capacities reach 75TB and 100TB respectively, assuming data can be compressed sufficiently; actual stored capacity depends on the content being archived. The 40TB product also uses a thin aramid-film construction that allows greater tape length in the cartridge while maintaining compatibility with LTO-10 drives. This combination of media design and coating quality is relevant to the investment in production facilities.
Tape is commonly used as part of a tiered storage architecture alongside hard drives, solid-state storage and networked systems. It is slower to access an individual file when a cartridge has to be located, loaded and positioned in a drive, but cartridges can be stored without continuous power to every medium. That physical separation can suit long retention periods and controlled offline copies. The system still needs careful inventory records, integrity testing, compatible drives and media-handling procedures to ensure information remains recoverable when required.
The higher-capacity media must meet controlled mechanical and magnetic tolerances throughout production. Automated tape libraries repeatedly load, transport and rewind cartridges, making coating uniformity, cleanliness, winding quality and dimensional stability important to dependable storage. Expansion at Odawara will add equipment and personnel to these processes, and higher throughput will have to be matched with consistent inspection and acceptance. Maintaining those standards is particularly important where cartridges are used for long retention periods and may be retrieved only occasionally.
AI training and cloud applications generate data with different access needs. Active working datasets may depend on high-speed online storage, while retained source material, backups and older versions can be candidates for tape libraries when recovery deadlines allow. Storage architecture therefore balances access frequency, retrieval time, retention requirements and the operating costs of drives and automated libraries. More archived data can increase demand for tape, but the mix of storage media depends on how organisations manage access and recovery across their systems.
Fujifilm has manufactured LTO media since the first generation of the format in 2000. Its investment extends that materials-processing and coating capability at Odawara, with expanded facilities and staffing planned through fiscal 2028. The measure of progress will be the installation and qualification of the additional production system and the volume of conforming high-capacity tape that the factory can make available to its customers.
