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Fujifilm expands magnetic tape production for AI-era data storage

A Japanese report separates the practical case for offline archives from the nostalgia bringing music cassettes back into cafés.

Channel: ANNnewsCH ·

JapanStory of November 14, 2026Trari Newsroom

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「磁気テープ」再注目　生成AIの普及でデータ量莫大に　情報流出リスク低く需要高まる【もっと知りたい！】【グッド！モーニング】(2026年11月13日)

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0:21Customers at Shibuya's CASSE café describe the appeal of cassette sound and mechanical player buttons.
1:08Fujifilm plans a ¥10 billion investment in Odawara to increase data-storage tape production capacity fivefold.
1:39Risako Wakatsuki links expansion to AI-driven data growth and anticipates additional demand for protection against unauthorized access.
2:04The report explains higher recording densities, offline storage and tapes' lack of electricity consumption while stored.
3:45Cassette specialist Akira Ebata demonstrates recording equipment and the large tape reels known as pancakes.
4:26Ebata explains how adjusting analog recording levels prevents distortion and helps achieve the sound customers want.

Fujifilm plans to increase its data-storage tape production capacity fivefold, putting a technology associated with cassette players to work on a very different problem: preserving the enormous volumes of information generated in the AI era.

Japan's All-Nippon News Network, through TV Asahi's ANNnewsCH channel, reports that the company will invest about ¥10 billion at its manufacturing site in Odawara, southwest of Tokyo. The report describes it as Fujifilm's first major investment of this kind in two decades.

Company representative Risako Wakatsuki says growing demand linked to generative AI prompted the expansion. She also expects greater interest in tape as protection against unauthorized access: cartridges can be physically disconnected from networks and stored offline, reducing their exposure to cyberattacks. While sitting in storage, the tapes themselves require no electricity.

The underlying recording principle is familiar, but these are digital data cartridges, not analog music cassettes. The report explains how increasingly fine magnetic particles, arranged densely and evenly on the tape surface, have enabled much larger storage capacities. Wakatsuki identifies long-term storage of large quantities of data as the main advantage.

Alongside that industrial story, the program visits CASSE, a cassette café in Tokyo's Shibuya district. Customers handle players and enjoy their mechanical buttons, while staff member Ami Takahashi says younger visitors find the retro sound fresh. That revival has a different driver from the demand for digital archives, a distinction viewers also raise in the comments.

In Mito, northeast of Tokyo, the report meets Akira Ebata, who has spent 45 years making music cassettes. He maintains aging machinery, demonstrates the large reels of tape known as pancakes and adjusts recording levels to prevent distortion while matching customers' preferred sound.

Production at his operation has risen from its low point, the report says. Ebata intends to keep making cassettes for as long as his company produces them: for him, tape is not a rediscovered technology but a life's work.

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