Since the computer age began, humanity has produced zetabytes of data. And with the launch of ChatGPT, we’ve seen how powerful that data can be when leveraged to develop artificial intelligence.
But that data is less permanent than it seems. It’s stored on hard drives that degrade over time. There are ways of keeping up with that degradation by constantly backing up and refreshing old data. But the reality is current methods are unsustainable.
In a paper published in Nature this week, Microsoft says it might have found an answer: borosilicate glass, a widely available and durable material that could preserve data reliably for 10,000 years.
The technique involves using lasers to rapidly etch data into 2mm sheets of glass that contain hundreds of layers of data. Microsoft has been at this since launching Project Silica in 2019. But previous methods involved expensive forms of glass that weren’t practical at scale.
We won’t have data centers filled with glass hard drives any time soon, but it’s a step toward ensuring all of human history doesn’t get wiped away by default.