LTO Tape Shipments Jump 57% Year Over Year In Q1 2026 On LTO-10 40TB Rollout And Archival Demand
StorageReview, Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026
LTO Tape Shipments Up 57% in Q1 2026 as AI and Archive Demand Accelerate
Linear Tape-Open shipments jumped significantly in the first quarter of 2026, reflecting robust enterprise expansion and the initial production ramp of next-generation LTO-10 media offering 40TB native capacity.
Following a record 176.5 exabytes shipped in 2024 and a slight decline to 160.3 exabytes in 2025, the consortium expects 2026 volumes to reach new highs. Organizations are increasingly adopting tape as a cost-effective cold storage tier for long-term retention and AI training datasets, leveraging its low operational expense, zero idle power consumption, and air-gap cyber resilience capabilities.