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Tape companies ship 160 exabytes of storage in 2025, AI data demands drive growth
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title: "Tape companies ship 160 exabytes of storage in 2025, AI data demands drive 'unprecedented data growth' — capacity shipped in Q1 2026 rose 57% YOY driven by AI, LTO‑9 momentum, and early LTO‑10 uptake"
url: "https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/tape-companies-ship-160-exabytes-of-storage-in-2025-ai-data-demands-drive-unprecedented-data-growth-capacity-shipped-in-q1-2026-rose-57-percent-yoy-driven-by-ai-lto-9-momentum-and-early-lto-10-uptake"
author: "Mark Tyson"Tape storage companies continue to celebrate substantial growth. The format might seem archaic in the mid 2020s but on Tuesday, the LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), HPE, IBM, and Quantum Corp., boasted of capacity shipment growth of 57% YOY, in Q1 2026. You guessed it: AI data center demands have contributed to bumper tape shipments, but so have the requirements for traditional archive workloads and cyber-resilient backups.
Last year, when we pondered over the LTO shipment numbers, we contrasted the medium’s undeniable success with Elon Musk’s DOGE crusade to wipe it out. It was criticized and dismissed for being “old technology.” But there’s certainly life in this old dog, as there were 176.5 exabytes of compressed LTO tape capacity shipped in 2024. Shipments were thus up 15.4% vs. the prior year and hit new records.
There was a small dip in LTO capacity shipped in 2025, an aberration characterized as "bad weather" by the TPCs on social media. This modest 9% YOY decline meant that 160.3 exabytes of tape storage were shipped last year. However, “shipped capacity was higher than any other year in history save 2024 itself,” wrote an LTO program representative in an email to Tom’s Hardware. The latest figures also show LTO demand is back with a vengeance, with shipped capacity in Q1 2026 a stunning 57% higher than in Q1 2025.
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“We are seeing unprecedented data growth combined with increasing cost, energy, and cyber resilience pressures across the industry,” said Hugues Meyrath, CEO, Quantum. “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.”
(Image credit: The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium Format companies)
Other contributors to growth, evidenced by the latest figures, were the market’s readiness for LTO-9 and LTO-10. The former is still being promoted by TPCs as a very worthwhile upgrade to stickers reliant on older generations. LTO-9 tapes support up to 18TB uncompressed or 45TB of compressed data according to the program companies. 2026 capacity shipment figures have also benefited from the early ramp of LTO-10. With these latest-gen cartridges up to 40TB of data per cartridge natively, or up to 100TB compressed, can be stored. Meanwhile, TPPCs are ensuring tape will continue to be attractive with roadmaps extending to LTO-14, which offers up to a gargantuan 576TB native capacity per cartridge, and can fit up to a touted 1,440TB compressed.
It is difficult to argue with the strong start for LTO shipments in 2026. The TPCs assert this is due to tape belonging “in every storage mix as an anchor against disruption.” LTO is also heralded as the storage medium possessing “the lowest cost per terabyte, provides excellent cyber-resilience, and is highly power-efficient.”
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title: "Tape companies ship 160 exabytes of storage in 2025, AI data demands drive 'unprecedented data growth' — capacity shipped in Q1 2026 rose 57% YOY driven by AI, LTO‑9 momentum, and early LTO‑10 uptake"
url: "https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/tape-companies-ship-160-exabytes-of-storage-in-2025-ai-data-demands-drive-unprecedented-data-growth-capacity-shipped-in-q1-2026-rose-57-percent-yoy-driven-by-ai-lto-9-momentum-and-early-lto-10-uptake"
author: "Mark Tyson"Tape storage companies continue to celebrate substantial growth. The format might seem archaic in the mid 2020s but on Tuesday, the LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), HPE, IBM, and Quantum Corp., boasted of capacity shipment growth of 57% YOY, in Q1 2026. You guessed it: AI data center demands have contributed to bumper tape shipments, but so have the requirements for traditional archive workloads and cyber-resilient backups.
Last year, when we pondered over the LTO shipment numbers, we contrasted the medium’s undeniable success with Elon Musk’s DOGE crusade to wipe it out. It was criticized and dismissed for being “old technology.” But there’s certainly life in this old dog, as there were 176.5 exabytes of compressed LTO tape capacity shipped in 2024. Shipments were thus up 15.4% vs. the prior year and hit new records.
There was a small dip in LTO capacity shipped in 2025, an aberration characterized as "bad weather" by the TPCs on social media. This modest 9% YOY decline meant that 160.3 exabytes of tape storage were shipped last year. However, “shipped capacity was higher than any other year in history save 2024 itself,” wrote an LTO program representative in an email to Tom’s Hardware. The latest figures also show LTO demand is back with a vengeance, with shipped capacity in Q1 2026 a stunning 57% higher than in Q1 2025.
Latest Videos FromTom's Hardware
“We are seeing unprecedented data growth combined with increasing cost, energy, and cyber resilience pressures across the industry,” said Hugues Meyrath, CEO, Quantum. “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.”
(Image credit: The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium Format companies)
Other contributors to growth, evidenced by the latest figures, were the market’s readiness for LTO-9 and LTO-10. The former is still being promoted by TPCs as a very worthwhile upgrade to stickers reliant on older generations. LTO-9 tapes support up to 18TB uncompressed or 45TB of compressed data according to the program companies. 2026 capacity shipment figures have also benefited from the early ramp of LTO-10. With these latest-gen cartridges up to 40TB of data per cartridge natively, or up to 100TB compressed, can be stored. Meanwhile, TPPCs are ensuring tape will continue to be attractive with roadmaps extending to LTO-14, which offers up to a gargantuan 576TB native capacity per cartridge, and can fit up to a touted 1,440TB compressed.
It is difficult to argue with the strong start for LTO shipments in 2026. The TPCs assert this is due to tape belonging “in every storage mix as an anchor against disruption.” LTO is also heralded as the storage medium possessing “the lowest cost per terabyte, provides excellent cyber-resilience, and is highly power-efficient.”
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Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or__, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
I wonder if the AI-driven increasing cost of HDD has made tape more attractive. LTO for smaller installations was uneconomical because of the enterprise marketing strategy that made the drives so expensive that tape systems were uncompetitive with HDD's unless you had maybe 1PB of data to archive. But now that crossover has dropped by a lot.
LTO itself has missed its capacity and timeline targets over the past several generations too, so the stuff about LTO-14 should be considered dreaming. LTO-10 was really only 30TB but then they introduced 40TB cartridges with thinner tape. They gave up on backwards compatibility with previous generations quite a few iterations ago, when that was one of LTO's premises from the beginning. They may have also tightened the storage condition requirements (temperature and humidity that you have to maintain for the tapes) so you need continuous climate control for your archived tapes, though I guess you've always neeed that. Oh yes the 40TB cartridges are $500+ each, cashing in on the HDD shortage.
LTO has always seemed like a cool product that's never been quite there for any but a niche sector.
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I wonder if the AI-driven increasing cost of HDD has made tape more attractive. LTO for smaller installations was uneconomical because of the enterprise marketing strategy that made the drives so expensive that tape systems were uncompetitive with HDD's unless you had maybe 1PB of data to archive. But now that crossover has dropped by a lot.
LTO itself has missed its capacity and timeline targets over the past several generations too, so the stuff about LTO-14 should be considered dreaming. LTO-10 was really only 30TB but then they introduced 40TB cartridges with thinner tape. They gave up on backwards compatibility with previous generations quite a few iterations ago, when that was one of LTO's premises from the beginning. They may have also tightened the storage condition requirements (temperature and humidity that you have to maintain for the tapes) so you need continuous climate control for your archived tapes, though I guess you've always neeed that. Oh yes the 40TB cartridges are $500+ each, cashing in on the HDD shortage.
LTO has always seemed like a cool product that's never been quite there for any but a niche sector.
i'm surprised to learn that anyone was still using tape.
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i'm surprised to learn that anyone was still using tape.
Oh lol, I see the press release uses the old projection of 576TB for LTO-14 but that has been scaled back because of the past few capacity misses. If you look at the diagram it now says 365TB.
Tape is great in principle, but the shiny shoes running the LTO consortium prefer to make it super expensive and market it only to big companies. They also are staying with the same cartridge format between generations despite giving up on cross-generation compatibility. They are using super high tech tape formulations to get capacity increases while it apparently hasn't occurred to them to just make the cartridges bigger so they can put more tape in them. Oh well.
Why tape? Because HDD's are complicated machines full of delicate mechanical and electronic stuff and they tend to fail if you don't keep them spinning. The lubricants dry out if you leave the drive sitting on a shelf for too long. So you keep them powered and online, and them a computer virus attacks them and exfiltrates or erases the data. While you can keep tape cartridges in a vault completely offline.
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