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Microsoft Research reported Nature results from Project Silica showing advances in laser-written glass storage aimed at ultra-long-term, immutable archiving (on the order of 10,000 years). The work extends prior approaches from expensive fused silica to more readily available borosilicate glass (e.g., cookware/oven-door glass), and describes engineering improvements intended to reduce cost and complexity, including faster parallel writing and simplified readout hardware (e.g., moving from multi-camera setups to a single-camera reader). The technique encodes data as microscopic voxel-scale modifications created with femtosecond laser pulses, and the team reports methods to support accelerated aging tests indicating long-lived data integrity.
Independent coverage described the same Nature publication and provided additional performance and density details: data is converted into symbols and written as layered voxel patterns within a thin glass volume, with a single laser pulse per voxel to improve efficiency. The researchers reported splitting the laser into four beams for parallel writing and achieving ~65.9 million bits/second write speed, and demonstrated high density (e.g., ~4.84 TB stored in a 12 cm², 2 mm-thick piece of fused silica). The reporting also emphasized the operational driver for the research—reducing reliance on magnetic tape and hard disks that require periodic migration due to limited media lifetimes—positioning glass as a potential medium for long-duration archives such as national records, scientific datasets, and enterprise retention stores.
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Alongside the Nature publication, Microsoft stated that the research phase of Project Silica had been completed and said it was publishing the work so others could build on the results.
Microsoft Research published a Nature paper describing major Project Silica advances, including use of ordinary borosilicate glass, faster parallelized writing, simplified reading hardware, and a new phase-voxel encoding method.
Microsoft published related Project Silica advances in storage-system design and decoding methods in an ACM Transactions on Storage publication.
Microsoft partnered with Global Music Vault to preserve music in glass under ice for an intended 10,000-year timespan, extending Project Silica from lab work to a preservation use case.
Microsoft's Project Silica previously demonstrated storing Warner Bros.' "Superman" on quartz glass as an early proof of concept for laser-written glass archival storage.
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