The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, International Business Machines Corporation, and Quantum Corporation, today released their annual tape media shipment report, marking a pivotal year for the format as a new generation of higher-capacity media arrives to meet unrelenting growth in enterprise data. The continued strength of LTO-9 media shipments combined with the introduction and early ramp of LTO-10 technology contributed to substantial year-over-year growth in Q1 2026, with shipped capacity rising 57% over Q1 2025. These developments underscore the strength and resilience of the underlying market as demand for tape solutions continues to grow.
“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.”
The latest annual figures show a steady climb in density in each LTO generation against a backdrop of successive customer upgrade cycles. 2024 set an all-time record at 176.5 exabytes, up 15.4%. While 2025 saw a modest 9% YOY decline to 160.3 exabytes, shipped capacity was higher than any other year in history save 2024 itself, indicating structurally high demand for tape solutions. The 57% YOY shipment capacity growth in Q1 further underscores this continued strength, and the early 2026 release of a new 40 TB native-capacity cartridge also contributed to renewed and growing market interest.
“Tape continues to be a pivotal, strategic storage solution, driven by the buildout of all types of storage to support AI workloads as well as growth in traditional archive workloads,” said Tom Coughlin, Storage Analyst and President, Coughlin Associates, Inc. “However, the evolving international trade environment contributed to more cautious purchasing behavior, with businesses across a wide range of industries adjusting their sourcing and inventory decisions accordingly. We suspect that if this uncertainty is resolved the continued strength of the tape storage market will be even more impressive, particularly as constrained power availability for data center buildouts favors including tape, which consumes less power than any other storage media.”
LTO’s strong start to 2026 confirms that many customers are fully committed to growing their tape infrastructure, leveraging the technology to complement other primary and secondary storage platforms. The new shipment report signals that at the scale organizations now operate, tape belongs in every storage mix as an anchor against disruption. Tape absorbs relentless data growth at the lowest cost per terabyte, provides excellent cyber-resilience, and is highly power-efficient. As organizations adopt tape as the pivotal technology for meeting these challenges, and as customers on earlier generations upgrade alongside new adopters, LTO anticipates that 2026 will further strengthen the tape market with another record-setting year.
Access the LTO Program’s annual shipment reports for tape media via the LTO Program website, www.lto.org.
About Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Format
The LTO Ultrium format is a powerful, scalable, adaptable open tape format developed and continuously enhanced by technology providers HPE, IBM Corporation and Quantum Corporation (and their predecessors) to address the growing demands of data protection in the midrange to enterprise-class server environments. This ultra-high capacity generation of tape storage products is designed to deliver outstanding performance, capacity and reliability combining the advantages of linear multi-channel, bi- directional formats with enhancements in servo technology, data compression, track layout, and error correction. The LTO Ultrium format is licensed to, and format- compliant products are made by, multiple manufacturers; their production is not limited to one sole proprietor. The LTO Ultrium format has a well-defined roadmap for growth and scalability. The roadmap represents intentions and goals only and is subject to change or withdrawal. There is no guarantee that these goals will be achieved. The roadmap is intended to outline a general direction of technology and should not be relied upon in making a purchasing decision. Format compliance verification is vital to meet the free-interchange objectives that are at the core of the LTO Program. Ultrium tape mechanism and tape cartridge interchange specifications are available on a licensed basis.
To learn more about LTO technology, visit www.lto.org and follow the LTO Program on LinkedIn.
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Contact
Melissa Cifarelli, LTO@matternow.com, 585-957-4599
