AI's Overlooked Storage Opportunity
TechRadar, Thursday, September 10th, 2026
Quantum's Skip Levens argues modern LTO tape is a cost-effective, secure tier for holding large AI datasets until needed.
Skip Levens of Quantum notes that AI training datasets are doubling every eight months, but data does not need high-performance storage at every stage of the pipeline.
Keeping all candidate datasets on always-on flash or disk becomes costly at scale, capping how much data an organization can keep in play.
He argues modern LTO tape now acts as an active tier that can stream data into fast storage when needed, at a fraction of the cost per terabyte with strong energy efficiency. Tape also adds hardware encryption, WORM immutability and offline air-gapped protection for irreplaceable data.