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
- ID
- 20689
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 02 Sep 2026, 9:24 PM
- Fetched
- 02 Sep 2026, 10:17 PM
- Provider
- Tom's Hardware
- Category
- technology
- Original 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
- Source URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/all
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 02 Sep 2026, 10:18 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnerssaas_founders
What happened
Tape storage vendors shipped 160 exabytes of capacity in 2025, with Q1 2026 capacity shipments rising 57% year-over-year, driven by AI data growth, LTO-9 momentum, and early LTO-10 adoption. The article body is mostly site navigation and membership boilerplate, so technical detail beyond the headline figures is unavailable.
Why it matters
If you are building AI pipelines or data lakes and haven't priced cold-storage tiers, the 57% YoY tape shipment surge signals that hyperscalers and enterprises are scaling archival storage aggressively for AI training data retention. Consider whether your storage architecture separates hot GPU-adjacent storage from cold tape-backed tiers, especially as LTO-10 brings higher per-cartridge capacity.
Discussion angle
For a Malaysian builder audience: does it make sense to factor tape-backed cold storage into cost models for AI data retention, or is this purely a hyperscaler concern irrelevant to regional startups and indie developers?