Quantum storage reports two consecutive quarters of growth, supporting data-center infrastructure expansion.

Quantum reported strong fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 results, marking its second consecutive growth quarter. For the quarter ended March 31, 2026, the company generated $78 million in revenue, beating guidance of $68 million and representing 27.3 percent year-over-year growth. The company reported a GAAP net loss of $9.5 million, compared to a $7.7 million loss in the year-ago quarter.

For the full fiscal year, Quantum reported revenues of $279.6 million, up from $274.1 million in the prior year. The full-year net loss improved to $101 million from $115.1 million a year earlier.

CEO Hugues Meyrath attributed the strong performance to robust demand for tiered storage solutions, stating: "Quantum delivered strong fourth quarter results with revenue of $78 million, representing 27% growth year-over-year. This performance reflects robust demand for our tiered storage solutions as the proliferation of AI-driven data rapidly reshapes the industry and enterprise storage infrastructure requirements."

Demand across storage solutions remained solid, driven by growth in data and AI-related workloads. However, supply chain and fulfillment timing constraints—particularly around disk and tape drives—limited Quantum's growth rate. Meyrath noted on the earnings call: "Our ability to grow faster was limited by supply chain and fulfillment timing particularly around disk and tape drives, which continues to be a factor for us in the near term. That said, we expect greater backlog conversion heading into the second half of this fiscal year."

The company ended the quarter with a record $45 million backlog, largely driven by supply availability constraints on disk and tape components. Tape library sales and momentum remained incredibly strong, but Quantum faced constraints from IBM's ability to deliver tape drives. Meyrath explained the outlook: "IBM is continuing to ramp up production of tape drives throughout the year. Our understanding is still a little tight in this quarter in the June quarter. But as you go into September and December quarter, we should see a lot more tape drives out there, which would allow us to convert the backlog into revenue on the tape driver side."

ActiveScale solutions—the company's disk and tape object storage platform—drove significant growth, with revenue tripling year-over-year. This expansion was fueled by new use cases around large-scale data management and AI workloads. Meyrath noted: "Adoption of ActiveScale cold storage solution continues to ramp, and we expect ongoing strong demand due to our unique capabilities and performance."

The shift toward tiered storage architectures continued to gain momentum, with more customers moving data out of primary storage and adopting disk and tape solutions. Meyrath highlighted these trends: "We're also seeing more customers actively moving data out of primary storage and adopting tiered storage architectures. That's driving increased interest in tape and object storage, particularly in large-scale environments where cost and power really matter."

Recent wins included a major deployment with a global sports network using ActiveScale cold storage integrated with tape libraries to host their complete content archive. Quantum continues to see existing customers expand their ActiveScale environments to hundreds of petabytes on the path toward exabyte scale.

The quarter was marked by significant volatility in component pricing. Disk drive prices increased by 250 percent during the quarter, while tape drive prices rose multiple times, beginning in Q1 and continuing through Q2. This created challenges for customer quotations, particularly in the March quarter. Meyrath stated: "So you requote the best you can, but it's been difficult, especially in the March quarter because there were several successive increases that came out of the left field." Looking ahead, he expects continued price increases: "I think it's less volatile than like the March quarter, but we do expect to see continuing price increase across storage for the foreseeable future."

Operating expenses improved significantly, declining to $30.4 million, or 39 percent of revenue, from $35.8 million, or 58.5 percent of revenue, in the year-ago quarter.

Quantum's financial position strengthened considerably. Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash totaled $16.2 million as of March 31, 2026, compared to $16.6 million a year earlier. Interest expense for the quarter and full year declined to $2.9 million and $21.6 million respectively, from $6.8 million and $24.0 million in the prior year. Outstanding term loan debt decreased to $55.9 million from $102.5 million a year earlier, reflecting debt elimination and refinancing activities completed during the period.

Meyrath emphasized the significance of this improvement: "Simply said, Quantum is in its strongest financial position in decades." The company enters fiscal 2027 from a position of renewed strength, having significantly lowered its cost structure, sharpened sales execution, and completed transactions that eliminated outstanding debt while adding cash to support growth initiatives.

For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Quantum expects revenues of $75 million plus or minus $2 million, representing 17 percent year-over-year growth at the midpoint.

The AI boom continues to drive DRAM, NAND, and HDD supply shortages and price escalation, which supports Quantum's tiered storage messaging but also complicates order fulfillment. With strengthened cash resources from refinancing, Quantum plans to place more aggressive orders for servers, disk drives, and flash to support backlog conversion over the summer and second half of the year.