Project Silica
News & features
Project Silica’s advances in glass storage technology
| Richard Black
Project Silica introduces new techniques for encoding data in borosilicate glass, as described in the journal Nature. These advances lower media cost and simplify writing and reading systems while supporting 10,000-year data preservation.
In the news | Nature
Laser writing in glass for dense, fast and efficient archival data storage
Long-term preservation of digital information is vital for safeguarding the knowledge of humanity for future generations. Existing archival storage solutions, such as magnetic tapes and hard disk drives, suffer from limited media lifespans that render them unsuitable for long-term data…
In the news | Science News Explores
High-speed lasers write data — to last millennia — inside glass
The library, robot, laser, microscope and platters of glass are all part of a research program named Project Silica. Richard Black directs this project at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. “Project Silica is a new approach to storing data,” he…
In the news | TechTarget
Project Silica takes archive data through the looking glass
As data grows, so does the need to store it. Microsoft’s Project Silica is offering an archive alternative to tape with the promise of permanence.
In the news | Communications of the ACM
Addressing the Data Storage Crisis
Our increasingly digitized world is creating more data every year, including videos from ubiquitous smart phones, observations from billions of sensors and surveillance cameras, output from artificial intelligence, and much more. Until now, exponential growth in data storage capacity has…
In the news | Electro Optics
Ariel Gomez Diaz named one of the Photonics100 for 2025
Microsoft Research senior optical scientist Ariel Gomez Diaz was selected for the 2025 Photonics100 list, which celebrates individuals driving innovation in photonics and optical technology worldwide. Ariel’s work explores revolutionary optical technologies with tangible applications for cloud infrastructure.
Collaborators: Silica in space with Richard Black and Dexter Greene
| Gretchen Huizinga, Richard Black, and Dexter Greene
College freshman Dexter Greene and Microsoft research manager Richard Black discuss how technology that stores data in glass is supporting students as they expand earlier efforts to communicate what it means to be human to extraterrestrials.
In the news | GeekWire
Microsoft joins with students to document humanity with a ‘Golden Record’ of glass
Forty-seven years after NASA sent a “Golden Record” into deep space to document humanity’s view of the world, Microsoft’s Project Silica is teaming up with a citizen-science effort to lay the groundwork — or, more aptly, the glasswork — for…
In the news | BBC Technology of Business
‘Insane’ amounts of data spurs new storage tech
Project Silica uses powerful lasers to enable a piece of glass about the size of a DVD to store more than seven terabytes of data, helping to manage the rapidly growing supply.