When artificial intelligence began driving storage demand, the data center industry initially turned to high-performance systems such as NVMe flash and network-attached hard drive arrays. But a quieter revival has been taking place in archives and backup libraries: magnetic tape, one of the oldest data storage technologies, has found a new role in the AI era. Low operating costs, high cartridge capacity, and an offline security posture make tape exceptionally well suited to the enormous volumes of data that AI creates and requires.
New figures from the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program Technology Provider Companies, which include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Quantum, show the scale of this rebound. The industry shipped 160.3 exabytes of compressed tape capacity in 2025, making it the second-largest year on record despite a 9% decline from the 176.5 exabytes shipped in 2024. More significantly, tape capacity shipments surged 57% year over year during the first quarter of 2026. That sales data suggests tape is not merely holding on to a legacy role; it is becoming more important as a storage tier for AI-related information, regulatory archives, and digital preservation.
“We are seeing unprecedented data growth combined with increasing cost, energy, and cyber resilience pressures across the industry,” said Hugues Meyrath, CEO of Quantum, in a statement. “As organizations adapt to this new reality, tape is increasingly viewed as a strategic component of modern data infrastructure, delivering predictable economics and resilient long-term data retention at scale.”
Why AI changed the archival storage equation
The AI revolution has created a torrent of information that organizations must retain for reasons ranging from model governance and legal compliance to future retraining and research. Training datasets, model checkpoints, experiment logs, evaluation results, and inference telemetry can consume enormous amounts of capacity. In many cases these assets need to be kept for years. Keeping every copy on flash storage would be prohibitively expensive, and keeping even large subsets online on hard drives can strain budgets and power limits. Tape has become a practical answer for storing the long tail of AI data that does not require instant retrieval but cannot be discarded.
The shift is also visible in how backup strategies have evolved. For decades, the most common backup target was a rack of mechanical hard drives, sometimes in a purpose-built backup appliance. Mechanical drives provide much larger capacities than solid-state drives and remain cheaper on a per-terabyte basis, which is why they are still widely used. But modern AI datasets have grown so large that even hard drive-based backup systems are no longer economical for the full production dataset. Tape cartridges with tens of terabytes of compressed capacity make it possible to store petabytes of offline data in a small footprint. When a robotic tape library is factored into the equation, tape offers one of the highest storage densities available in the data center.
There is also a lifecycle dimension to tape's resurgence. Data from active AI training flows into high-speed flash storage, where it can be accessed quickly while models are being developed. Once a project moves into production or a checkpoint loses its immediate value, that data does not need to remain on expensive storage. Storage administrators have learned to classify data by access frequency and move older or less critical data down the storage hierarchy. Tape is increasingly treated as the final archive tier, holding the largest copy of the data set at the lowest possible cost.
Capacity, cost, and operational efficiency
The advantages of tape-based backup start with capacity. A single compressed tape can hold anywhere from 30TB to 250TB of data, depending on the generation and compression ratio. Inside a large tape library, a carousel or shelf system can hold dozens or even hundreds of cartridges, with a robotic arm loading and unloading tapes as needed. This design lets an organization maintain an enormous amount of nearline and offline data without dedicating vast floor space to thousands of spinning disks.
Tape also offers a total cost of ownership advantage that is hard to ignore. Magnetic tape media is inexpensive, and tape drives are shared resources rather than dedicated devices that must always stay connected. A single tape drive can write many cartridges sequentially, and the library can spin down drives that are not in use. For archival workloads, where the goal is to write once and read rarely, this architecture is far more efficient than a fully powered hard drive system.
Power consumption is one of the biggest operational factors in modern data centers. Tape cartridges sitting idle in a library or vault consume no electricity and produce no heat. They do not generate heat and do not require continuous cooling. Hard drive arrays must remain powered for data to be accessible, and even backup appliances built around drives consume electricity around the clock. Tape consumes power only when a tape is loaded into a drive for a read or write operation. For organizations storing hundreds of petabytes, the energy difference can be substantial.
The air gap becomes a security advantage
Equally important is the “air gap” that tape provides. A tape cartridge is a removable medium. When it is not inside a tape drive, it is physically disconnected from the storage network. This creates a security boundary that is difficult for malware to cross. Ransomware attackers who compromise a server, storage array, or backup software portal cannot silently encrypt tapes sitting in a vault. Even if an attacker gains administrative privileges to the backup application, tape cartridges can be protected by write protection switches, write-once settings, or simple physical removal.
This offline protection has made tape a go-to defense for organizations seeking ransomware resilience. In recent years, many companies have adopted the 3-2-1 backup rule: three copies of data, on two different media, with one copy kept offsite or offline. Tape is one of the most efficient ways to fulfill that rule. A tape cartridge can be moved to a different physical location, mounted in a hardened vault, or stored in a fireproof cabinet. It does not need an internet connection, and it does not expose an attack surface through a network protocol. The small physical size of tape makes offsite storage easier than moving an entire hard drive array.
A storage technology with a long roadmap
Tape is often described as old technology, but it has gone through rigorous cycles of standardization and improvement since LTO was first introduced. The original Linear Tape-Open specification was developed in the late 1990s as an open alternative to proprietary tape formats. It quickly became the dominant standard for high-capacity backup and archival storage. The LTO consortium has maintained a predictable roadmap, with successive generations offering roughly double the capacity and improved performance.
Current LTO-generation cartridges are commonly rated at 18TB native capacity or about 45TB compressed, depending on the data being stored. That is a significant increase from early LTO cartridges, which offered only 100GB of native capacity. The roadmap continues to extend far beyond today's products, with future generations expected to push compressed cartridge capacities toward the 250TB range. Tape drive vendors have also improved transfer speeds, media durability, and error-correction features, allowing tape to handle the high throughput demands of modern backup windows.
Tape’s physical robustness is another reason it remains relevant. Modern tape cartridges are designed for long-term storage, with media life expectations measured in decades under proper storage conditions. That makes tape suitable for organizations that need to retain data for compliance periods stretching 10, 20, or even 30 years. Hard drives can fail, flash memory can lose charge over time, and online systems can be corrupted by software bugs or cyberattacks. Tape offers a stable, removable record that can survive the life span of the hardware that wrote it.
AI, cloud, and the growing importance of cold storage
The growth of AI has also changed how storage vendors think about the cloud. Hyperscale providers and enterprise data centers are building enormous machine learning pipelines that generate more data than can be economically stored in active tiers. Cloud providers themselves operate large tape-backed archival services, because the economics of tape remain favorable when users need to keep data for years. Tape is also used by research institutions, government agencies, media companies, and healthcare organizations because they all need long-term retention at a manageable cost.
The first-quarter numbers from the LTO Program provide an early signal that archival storage demand is accelerating rather than slowing. If AI training data continues to grow at its current pace, the need for cold storage will expand alongside it. Enterprises are realizing that not all data needs to live on fast storage. Some data only needs to exist, remain intact, and be available when a future project or regulatory inquiry calls for it. Tape can deliver that outcome without adding massive power draw or exposing critical copies to online threats.
The AI data boom is therefore not just a story about graphics processors, large language models, or high-speed interconnects. It is also a story about the unglamorous work of storing and protecting data for decades. Tape has re-emerged as a serious strategic option because it solves some of the hardest problems in modern storage: capacity scaling, energy efficiency, long-term reliability, and secure offline copies. The latest shipment figures suggest that the storage industry is paying attention.
Source: Network World News