Microsoft's Silica stores 2 million books in palm-sized glass for 10,000+ years
Feb 24th 2026
Silica uses ultrashort laser pulses to write three-dimensional voxels inside ordinary glass and demonstrates a full write-read system with long-term archival stability.
- Silica encodes about two million books worth of data in a thin, palm-sized square of ordinary glass.
- The system writes data with femtosecond laser pulses that inscribe tiny 3D voxels inside the glass.
- Micro-explosion void voxels reach a density of 1.59 gigabits per cubic millimetre while phase change voxels trade density for faster, lower-energy writing at about 65.9 megabits per second.
- The research presents a complete platform including encoding, writing, reading, decoding and error correction rather than a single new discovery.
- Accelerated ageing tests indicate the data could remain readable for more than 10,000 years.
- Silica builds on decades of prior work and relies on commercially available ultrafast lasers, positioning it as a candidate for long-term archival storage that could outlast tape and hard drives.