A Tiny Piece of Glass Beats Out Data Centers—As the Key to Protecting Human Knowledge for Thousands of Years

6 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Scientists recently wrote the entirety of the human genome onto a small 5D glass crystal with lasers. This new durable glass media could preserve all of humanity’s knowledge and history for up to 10,000 years, but conceivably for billions of years.The nature of glass storage means data can’t be stolen or corrupted using traditional hacking methods.The tool to access and read the data could become available for businesses to use in a few years, researchers say, and one developer is aiming for commercial deployment in about five years.An article in the November 1962 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine warned of a coming crisis in how we stored and retrieved information. The proposed solution: photochromic microimaging, which dramatically shrank documents onto photographic film that was later projected full-size onto a screen for reading.Sixty-four years later, we still have a data storage problem. That film and everything that has come along since has a short life span, is vulnerable to environmental factors like temperature and moisture, and requires enormous amounts of energy and other resources to maintain.A hard disk drive might last five years, a tape 10 years. “Once that lifetime is up, you’ve got to copy it over, which is difficult and tremendously unsustainable if you think of the energy and resources used,” Richard Black, PhD, wrote in an emailed statement. Black leads a team researching data-center scale storage technologies and new storage media at Microsoft.Scientists say glass may be the ultimate solution, a medium capable of holding the entirety of human knowledge and history for posterity. The claim comes after decades of research on glass storage at the University of Southampton Optoelectronics Research Centre in the U.K. and by Microsoft’s Project Silica, some of it in collaboration.As of January 2025, the research center has used ultrafast lasers to write the full human genome onto a 5D crystal about the size of a quarter. The genomes of any endangered species also could be preserved this way, virtually forever. Other crystals are similar in size to a half-dollar coin, with the largest less than 5 inches in diameter.What Is Glass Storage?Researchers at the University of Southampton developed glass plates or crystals with five dimensions—three spatial and two optical—that can store up to 360 terabytes.The crystals are made of pure fused silica or quartz glass, which is over 99 percent silica, or silicon dioxide (SiO2), common in nature as quartz and sand. One of the most durable materials on Earth, this glass shrugs off fire, temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, direct impact of half a ton, humidity, liquid, and electromagnetic pulses. Once information is recorded on it, the material requires no energy to preserve and could conceivably last for billions of years, says Peter Kazansky, PhD, an optoelectronics expert at the University of Southampton and chief science officer at SPhotonix, a company he co-founded to commercialize the technology.But quartz glass is expensive, relatively difficult to manufacture, and available from only a few sources. The laser writing and reading systems are also costly. Before it can be widely implemented, the technology needs to be faster, simpler, and less expensive.Researchers at Microsoft reported several needed breakthroughs in a February 2026 paper in the journal Nature. They stored nearly 2 terabytes of data on borosilicate, a glass common in cookware and lab flasks made of boron oxide and around 80 percent silica. It is as little as one-tenth the cost of quartz glass and easier to manufacture but still incredibly durable, with research suggesting a life span of 10,000 years—not millions, but still more than adequate for most purposes. This research also improved the efficiency of the laser system and reduced the complexity of writing and reading data. We still won’t be using our laptops to store data in glass anytime soon, but that may not matter, given its likely uses.Why Glass Could Be a Game ChangerGlass is most suitable for archival storage, safely and securely holding large amounts of data for hundreds of years or more, such as in national archives, museums, and libraries. The words “safe” and “secure” take on greater meaning given recent news that the German Climate Computing Center, one of the world’s largest repositories for climate simulation data, is storing backup versions of climate simulations produced by U.S. scientists out of concerns the U.S. government could block access to them. Glass media could provide a safe haven for many such scientific datasets, including decades-long measurements on climate and biodiversity.However, glass media storage won’t replace massive data centers. Most of the information in those needs to be accessible and work quickly, for everything from searches to retrieving documents—and adding to, deleting from, or changing what is there. Those actions simply aren’t practical with the “write it and forget it” nature of glass storage.But glass storage does require only a fraction of the space of other methods, and using it for archives could avoid the need for data centers to hold things like long-term compliance and regulatory archives, medical imaging and patient records, legal and financial records, and cultural items such as the world’s music and art.It also could save money long term; because data won’t be accessed or altered, the only real cost is writing it in the first place, no matter how long it is kept. “Once you have paid to keep the data, there is little point in deleting it,” Black writes, “and you might as well keep it in case some valuable scenario is discovered in future.”And there’s no worry about the data being stolen or corrupted, as the physical nature of glass storage makes it immune to traditional hacking methods.Aside from its potential to protect human knowledge in an indelible format, businesses that do their own data storage see glass as the ultimate backup, Kazansky says, and block chain and crypto customers have expressed interest in using it for storing their wallets. SPhotonix already has stored a variety of documents and cultural works on the crystals.The company creates the crystals at a secure facility in Switzerland. Customers send digital data over its secure platform, and the facility uses a trademarked process to write it into a crystal. Afterward, the digital data is deleted from the platform and the facility PC.A major focus of current work at SPhotonix is scaling capacity of the fused silica platform toward large-scale commercial deployment, possibly within the next five years. But long term, the company anticipates starting research into lower-cost materials such as borosilicate glass, which could make future generations of permanent data storage technology even more commercially viable.How to Record Data on a Glass CrystalExplaining how glass storage works takes words that sound like they came from a Star Wars script: nanostructures, voxels, femtosecond lasers.More simply, the University of Southampton researchers used a laser system that produces extremely short and intense pulses of light at the scale of a femtosecond, or one quadrillionth of a second. These pulses create layers of nanostructured dots that modify the polarization of the glass, or the way light travels through it.The Microsoft project used femtosecond lasers to create a type of glass modification called phase voxels. Voxels, three-dimensional equivalents of the pixels that make up a flat image, also permanently modify the physical structure of the glass by changing its index of refraction, which affects how much the light slows down and bends. These modifications encode multiple bits of data in hundreds of stacked layers. When Microsoft started the project, each voxel took dozens of laser pulses to form, but Black writes that now they can create one with a single pulse, which is much simpler and less costly.When its time to read the information on the crystal, sweeping the glass through an optical microscope with a high-speed camera captures images of the voxels. Then, decoding software turns those images back into the original data. Microsoft researchers have verified that the written data decodes back without errors.SPhotonix uses a similar process to read its 5D memory crystals. Currently, data can only be read in the SPhotonix lab, but the company is working on a tool that businesses can use themselves, and it could be available in a few years.According to Black, Microsoft has concluded its research and shared the results so that others may build on the work.By the time another 64 years pass, maybe someone will read this article from a 5D memory crystal. By then, it should be clear whether or not glass truly is the ultimate storage medium.Austin-based science writer and author Melissa Gaskill focuses on ocean issues, endangered wildlife, the environment, and space. She has written for dozens of publications including Mental Floss, Scuba Diving Magazine, Men's Journal, Alert Diver, Stardate, and Scientific American.