Tape storage is proving to have the capacity needed for AI’s massive datasets.
The combination of low operating costs, high capacity and offline protection makes tape storage particularly well suited to the massive storage requirements of AI workloads.
Companies behind the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) storage standard say 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.
The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies includes Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Quantum. The group says the resurgence reflects the enormous amounts of data being generated by AI systems, along with continued demand for conventional archival storage and offline backups.
“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.”
Tape’s resurgent boom can be traced to the AI revolution, which has significantly increased the amount of data organizations need to retain. Training datasets, model checkpoints, research data. and other AI-related information can consume enormous amounts of storage.
The most popular form of data backup are traditional mechanical hard drives, which have the capacity and affordability than SSDs do not have. But the data sets are so enormous that they have outgrown even hard drive-based backup and only tape has the capacity needed.
There are some advantages to tape-based backup as well. For starters, capacity. Compressed tapes can hold anywhere from 30TB to 250TB of data, and that’s on one tape. In a large tape library, a carousel can hold dozens or even hundreds of tape cartridges, loaded and unloaded by a robotic arm.
Secondly, the tapes don’t have to be powered while sitting idle in storage, so power consumption is considerably lower than for hard drive-based backup.
Finally, tape backup as what is called an “air gap,” where there is physically no connection to the tape while in storage. The tape sits in a storage unit physically disconnected from the drive. That’s one security method that no hacker can get around.
