By Damien Pine
Publication Date: 2026-02-19 20:45:00
Robot libraries filled with tiny glass ‘books’ could store data for millennia
A Microsoft Research study suggests glass blocks etched with lasers could provide enduring data archives
A piece of glass with a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator map data encoded on it.
A team at Microsoft Research combined lasers, machine learning and tiny glass rectangles to demonstrate a new robotic data storage system that could, in theory, still be readable 10,000 years from now—twice as long as humans have been writing things down to date. The process, described recently in Nature, is designed for archiving records that don’t need to be accessed often, such as certain climate measurements, historical records and other reference materials. If scaled, the technology could someday store mountains of humanity’s accumulated knowledge in libraries made of glass.
“This is an exciting and very promising development,” says Doris…