Microsoft’s tech for 10,000-year data storage now works with kitchenware glass

Image: A piece of Project Silica media written with data. Image credit: Microsoft. Article by Abhimanyu Ghoshal. New Atlas – February 21, 2026. Research article: Nature.

For roughly a decade, Microsoft has been perfecting a high-density storage technology that uses glass, lasers, and cameras, and ensures it stays intact for millennia. That’s a huge improvement over existing magnetic tape and hard drives used for archiving data, which are good for only up to a decade at the most. It’s called Project Silica, and we’ve seen it demonstrated a couple of times: holding the 1978 movie Superman on a coaster-sized slide of silica glass in 2019, and with its capacity expanded a hundredfold, from some 75 GB to more than 7 TB in 2023. […]

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