Microsoft Research has developed a method to store data in ordinary glass that can last 10,000 years. A single tiny square can hold 2 million books worth of information, offering a potential solution to the digital preservation crisis.
Cloud storage companies want you on monthly subscriptions. Microsoft Research just built something that outlasts civilizations.
The technology, called Project Silica, uses femtosecond lasers to create microscopic 3D structures inside glass plates. Each voxel (3D pixel) stores multiple bits of data by varying the laser's intensity and polarization. The result is a storage medium that's immune to electromagnetic pulses, water damage, fire (up to 500°C), and the data degradation that plagues traditional storage.
For context: hard drives last 3-5 years. SSDs might make it 10 years under ideal conditions. Optical discs degrade in decades. Magnetic tape—the current archival standard—might survive a century if stored perfectly. Project Silica glass is rated for 10,000+ years at room temperature.
The density is remarkable. A single glass plate the size of a DVD can store 7 terabytes—roughly 2 million books, or about 1.75 million high-resolution photos. The data is written once and can be read repeatedly without degradation.
This solves a real problem. Libraries, governments, and corporations struggle with digital preservation. File formats become obsolete. Storage media degrades. Data gets lost in format migrations. We're creating more information than ever, but preserving less of it than previous generations who used paper and stone.
The Vatican could store its entire archive—2,000 years of documents—on a few hundred glass plates that would outlast the building they're stored in. The Library of Congress could preserve its digital collection in a space smaller than a walk-in closet.
There's a catch: writing data to glass is slow. The laser etching process currently runs at about 1-2 megabits per second—roughly the speed of dial-up internet. And you can't edit or delete data once written. This isn't general-purpose storage. It's archival.
That's fine. Archival storage doesn't need to be fast. It needs to be permanent.
Microsoft has already partnered with the Global Music Vault, which stored a copy of The Mission: Impossible soundtrack on Project Silica glass in a test of the technology. The Vatican is evaluating the system for archival preservation.
Now here's the question: will Microsoft actually productize this?
Microsoft Research has a history of building genuinely impressive technology that never makes it to market. Kinect motion sensing, HoloLens mixed reality, Courier dual-screen tablets—all ahead of their time, all ultimately shelved or abandoned.
Project Silica doesn't fit neatly into Microsoft's subscription model. You can't charge monthly recurring revenue for storage that lasts millennia. The market for archival preservation is real but niche—libraries, governments, compliance-driven enterprises. Not exactly the billion-user scale that modern tech companies target.
But maybe that's okay. Not everything needs to be a consumer product. Sometimes technology serves a specific, important function for specialized users who actually need it.
Digital preservation matters. Future historians will understand the 20th century better than they'll understand the 21st, because the 20th century left paper trails and the 21st century leaves bit-rot.
Project Silica could change that. If Microsoft actually brings it to market.
The technology is genuinely impressive. Now let's see if they productize it.
