Shipments of Linear Tape-Open (LTO) magnetic tapes in Q1 2026 increased by 57% compared to the same period in 2025. The main reason for the rise is attributed to AI companies that are accumulating data for training large language models and performing inference.
The LTO consortium, which includes HPE, IBM, and Quantum Corporation, notes that the figures could have been even higher, but geopolitical uncertainty is pressuring the market, shifting the plans of corporate customers. Quantum's CEO, Yu Meirat, links the growth to the increasing volumes of digital data and the processing loads associated with it. He emphasizes that rising equipment costs, growing electricity bills, and demands for cyber resilience are driving businesses back to long-term storage solutions like LTO Ultrium. The history of recent years resembles a seesaw. In 2024, LTO media set a record with 176.5 exabytes of shipped capacity. In 2025, the market declined by 9% to 160.3 exabytes. Now, the consortium forecasts a resumption of growth by the end of 2026.
The main driver in the first quarter was the ninth-generation tapes, but market attention is already shifting to LTO-10, which was released in early 2026. Current generation specifications: LTO-9 – 18 TB uncompressed and up to 45 TB compressed; LTO-10 – 40 TB uncompressed and up to 100 TB compressed. It is expected that LTO-10 will attract new customers in the coming months. Analyst Tom Coughlin points out that the growth of LTO Ultrium is fueled by both AI workloads and traditional archiving. Many organizations view tape not just as secondary storage but as part of the primary platform. In mixed infrastructures, it serves as a stable anchor due to its low cost per terabyte and the lack of need for continuous power for archive storage.