The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence has created unprecedented storage demands, and unexpectedly, an old-school technology is benefiting: magnetic tape. Once considered outdated, tape storage is making a strong comeback as organizations grapple with petabytes of AI training data, model checkpoints and long-term retention requirements.
Why Tape Is Back in the Spotlight
According to the LTO Program Technology Provider Companies, which includes Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Quantum, tape capacity shipments reached 160.3 exabytes in 2025. That made it the second-largest year on record for the Linear Tape-Open standard, even though it represented a 9% decline from the 176.5 exabytes shipped in 2024. More significantly, early data for 2026 shows a sharp acceleration: tape capacity shipments jumped 57% year over year in the first quarter.
The resurgence is being driven mainly by the enormous amounts of data produced by AI systems. Training datasets, model checkpoints, research logs and other AI-related information can consume hundreds of petabytes in a single enterprise. Beyond AI, there remains steady demand for conventional archival storage and offline backups, which tape has served for decades.
Hugues Meyrath, CEO of Quantum, said in a statement that the industry is seeing unprecedented data growth along with rising cost, energy and cyber resilience pressures. "As organizations adapt to this new reality," Meyrath said, "tape is increasingly viewed as a strategic component of modern data infrastructure, delivering predictable economics and resilient long-term data retention at scale."
AI Workloads Accelerate Data Generation
Modern AI pipelines generate data far faster than traditional enterprise applications. Training large language models requires ingesting huge text corpora, image sets, video libraries and scientific datasets. Each epoch of training may produce checkpoints that allow engineers to restore work if a system fails or to compare model performance across runs. These checkpoints can be tens or hundreds of gigabytes each, and a single training project might produce thousands of them.
Additionally, regulatory requirements are pressuring organizations to keep more data for longer periods. Financial services, healthcare and government agencies all face strict retention rules, and the growing use of AI in those sectors adds another layer of compliance complexity. Tape offers an ideal match for such use cases because it can store very large volumes of data at a lower total cost than disk or flash.
Tape's Practical Advantages
The most commonly cited benefit of tape is capacity. A single compressed tape cartridge today can hold anywhere from 30TB to 250TB of data, depending on the generation and compression ratio. In a large tape library, a carousel or robotic shelf can hold dozens or even hundreds of cartridges, with a robotic arm loading and unloading them automatically. That means a single tape library can extend from hundreds of terabytes to multiple exabytes with ease.
Power efficiency is another major advantage. Tape cartridges do not require electricity while sitting idle in storage. Unlike hard disk arrays, which draw power constantly to keep platters spinning, tape media is completely passive until it is loaded into a drive. For a data center storing many petabytes, the difference in energy consumption and cooling requirements can be dramatic. This is especially important in an era where power costs and carbon emissions are under scrutiny.
Security also plays a crucial role in tape's revival. Tape backup provides what is called an "air gap." When a tape is stored in a library or offsite vault, it is physically disconnected from any network or drive. To access the data, someone must physically retrieve the tape and insert it into a tape drive. This makes tape immune to ransomware attacks and remote cyber intrusions, because no hacker can reach data that is not connected to the network. For organizations concerned about data extortion, air-gapped tape backup is increasingly seen as a non-negotiable safeguard.
Comparing Tape with Hard Drives and SSDs
For many years, traditional mechanical hard drives have been the most popular form of data backup. Hard drives offer more capacity per dollar than solid-state drives and have faster access times than tape. They are also familiar to IT teams, and most backup software supports disk targets natively. But the scale of AI data has begun to outgrow even hard drive-based backup environments. Enterprises that once could schedule nightly backups to disk now find that their backup windows are too short and their storage racks are too small.
Tape fills that gap. While tape cannot match the random-access speed of SSDs or the moderate seek times of hard drives, it excels at sequential write operations, which are typical for backup and archiving. The economics become compelling when data is retained for months or years but rarely accessed. Tape consumes almost no power, requires no active cooling, and occupies less physical space than comparable hard disk shelves. The media itself is also portable and can be stored offsite for disaster recovery purposes.
A Long-History Medium Reinvented
Magnetic tape storage has been around since the 1950s, when it was used on early mainframe computers. For much of computing history, it was the primary medium for large-scale data storage. The industry moved away from tape as disk prices fell, but tape never disappeared. Instead, it built a loyal following in enterprises that needed to archive data economically over long periods.
The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) program was launched in the late 1990s by HP, IBM and Seagate, which was later replaced by Quantum. LTO created open standards that encouraged compatibility and healthy competition among tape drive and media manufacturers. Over the years, LTO generations have steadily improved in capacity and speed, and the roadmap continues with even higher capacities. The recent surge in shipment volume indicates that tape's role is expanding once again, not just as a backup medium, but as a core component in data infrastructure.
Storage Economics in the Age of AI
AI projects are extremely data hungry. Organizations are collecting telemetry from edge devices, storing terabytes of user behavior, and preserving enormous corpuses of text, image, audio and video files. This data has real value, but storing it all on primary flash storage is prohibitively expensive. Even hybrid environments that tier data between flash and hard disk can become strained when workloads scale at exponential rates.
Tape provides a practical tier for the coldest data, which accounts for a large percentage of overall capacity in data-intensive industries. By moving old backups, completed model versions and archived logs to tape, enterprises can free up expensive disk and flash space for active workloads. This tiering approach is not new, but AI has accelerated the need for it. As a result, tape libraries are being integrated into modern data management workflows alongside software-defined storage and object storage systems.
Vendors have noticed the trend. Tape drive manufacturers have introduced features such as LTFS and improved automation that make tape libraries easier to manage. Modern tape libraries can be managed like enormous file repositories, with metadata stored on the tape itself. This reduces the complexity of using tape and makes it feasible for enterprises that lack specialized mainframe staff.
Looking Ahead at Tape Storage
The first quarter of 2026 delivered a 57% year-over-year increase in tape capacity shipments, a clear sign that demand is not slowing down. Industry experts expect this momentum to continue as more organizations deploy AI and as data sovereignty regulations push companies to retain data in isolated, secure environments. Tape's offline nature also aligns with emerging cyber resilience strategies, where businesses plan for the possibility that online storage may be compromised by malware.
Manufacturers continue to develop the LTO roadmap, with each new generation doubling or nearly doubling the previous one's capacity. This steady progression ensures that tape will remain competitive with disk and cloud storage for large-scale archival workloads. The rise of generative AI, self-service analytics and machine learning operations means that data creation is likely to keep accelerating for years. Under that scenario, tape's combination of capacity, energy efficiency, and air-gapped security gives it a sustainable advantage over every online storage medium.
With AI workloads continuing to multiply and regulations demanding longer retention periods, tape's unique mix of scale, security and cost efficiency is likely to keep it in the data center for years to come.
Source:Network World News