COMPUTING

Microsoft found out how to etch 5 terabytes of data into a piece of glass …and it survives for 10,000 years! > Project Silica is a storage system that uses ultrafast lasers to write data directly into glass. > Each laser pulse lasts one trillionth of a second and carves microscopic structures called voxels into 301 layers inside ordinary glass (the same kind your food container is probably made out of). > To read the data back, a microscope captures images of each layer, and an AI image recognition model decodes the patterns with zero errors. But what's wild is the glass needs NO power to maintain its data. It's immune to heat, water, radiation, and magnetic fields that would normally wipe conventional hard drives over the years. Accelerated aging tests predict the data will survive past 10,000 years at room temperature, twice as long as the oldest known writing in the world. For context, today's cloud archives burn enormous amounts of energy just keeping data alive on degrading magnetic tape. Glass storage needs none of that.

→ View original post on X — @rowancheung, 2026-03-08 17:29 UTC