Boffins at the software king of the world, Microsoft, have emerged from their smoke-filled labs with a piece of glass which they say can store data for more than 10,000 years.
In Nature on 18 February 2026, Microsoft Research rolled out Project Silica, a working demo that can read and write data into small glass slabs at a density of more than a gigabit per cubic millimetre.
Glass gets a bad rap as fragile and supposedly “flowing” over the centuries, which is a myth. Microsoft is betting on it because it can be made “thermally and chemically stable and is resistant to moisture ingress, temperature fluctuations and electromagnetic interference.”
Writing the data is done by firing lasers to burn features into the interior of the glass, not chemically etching the surface, and the big enabler is femtosecond lasers that fire ridiculously short pulses and can do it millions of times per second.
Reading is done with microscopy that picks up refractive index differences, with the piece of glass written in layers spaced so only one layer sits in focus at a time.
The Volish boffins tried two ways to define a data unit, or voxel. One uses birefringence, where refraction depends on polarisation, created by a first pulse that makes an oval void and a second polarised pulse that induces birefringence.
That voxel is identified by the oval’s orientation and because multiple orientations can be resolved, you can cram more than one bit into a voxel.
The other method changes the magnitude of refractive effects by varying the energy in the laser pulse, again allowing multiple states and therefore multiple bits per voxel.
To decode the microscope images, Microsoft used a convolutional neural network that pulls information from images in and near the focal plane, because neighbouring voxels subtly change how a voxel looks.
On the encoding side, Silica takes the raw bitstream, adds error correction using a low-density parity-check code, the same approach used in 5G networks, then groups bits into symbols designed to exploit multi-bit voxels.
Writing speed is still the pain point, so Microsoft built hardware that can write one slab with four lasers at once without cooking it, hitting 66 megabits per second.
The team reckons it can add more than a dozen additional lasers, but the maths is still grim when a 12cm by 12cm by 0.2cm slab can hold up to 4.84TB, meaning more than 150 hours to fill one at current speeds.
The birefringence route needs fancier optics and higher-quality glass but delivers higher density, while the simpler approach works on any transparent material and tops out at a bit more than two terabytes per slab.
Vole says borosilicate glass is so stable that accelerated ageing suggests data retention of more than 10,000 years at room temperature, and declared: “Our results demonstrate that Silica could become the archival storage solution for the digital age.”
That is a bit rich when a project like the Square Kilometre Array is expected to archive 700 petabytes per year, which would mean more than 140,000 slabs annually just for that telescope.
Even if you juice write speed by throwing lasers at it, you would need more than 600 Silica machines running in parallel to keep up, and that is before you look at everyone else dumping data into the void.
Still, the pitch has two killer perks: zero energy to preserve data when it is sitting there and faster retrieval than DNA storage, and the medium looks like it fell off a sci-fi set.
