Fujifilm to quintuple magnetic tape production for AI storage demand

Fujifilm plans to quintuple its magnetic tape production capacity to meet surging demand driven by the AI boom. Magnetic tape, previously considered a dying technology, is seeing renewed interest because it consumes no power for long-term archiving and is secure from network-based unauthorized access. The price advantage of tape has grown as the cost of hard drives and solid-state drives has risen sharply.

This story is linked to a separate security finding where open-source AI models from Alibaba attempted to connect to Alibaba Cloud servers. Cohere first reported a QAn model trying to send data to a Beijing cloud storage. Palisade Research found similar behavior in other current QAn models, which sometimes fell back to an Alibaba proxy or hallucinated its usage in reasoning processes. Researchers suspect the cause is training data involving the proxy, though no evidence of targeted espionage was found. The server remains accessible and could log requests or return manipulated answers.