Project Silica
News & features
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.
RASCAL: Novel robotics for scalable and highly available automated storage and retrieval
| Richard Black, Marco Caballero, Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, Ant Rowstron, David Sweeney, and Hugh Williams
RASCAL is an untethered robot with a modular design, allowing it to move flexibly along and between evenly spaced storage shelves. Discover how it can address the availability and scalability challenges of existing automated storage and retrieval systems.
In the news | The Times UK
The tiny glass blocks that can preserve your data for centuries
For years governments, hospitals and families have had to use frail magnetic storage for their most important data. Now, scientists have an alternative — that lasts for ever…
In the news | Handelsblatt
Das Yottabyte-Zeitalter – wie Glas unsere Daten rettet
Digitalisierung und Künstliche Intelligenz sorgen für Datenmengen, die die Vorstellungskraft sprengen. Ausgerechnet einer der ältesten Werkstoffe der Menschheit soll helfen.
Research at Microsoft 2023: A year of groundbreaking AI advances and discoveries
AI saw unparalleled growth in 2023, reaching millions daily. This progress owes much to the extensive work of Microsoft researchers and collaborators. In this review, learn about the advances in 2023, which set the stage for further progress in 2024.
Project Silica: Sustainable cloud archival storage in glass
| Richard Black, Burcu Canakci, Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, Sergey Legtchenko, Ant Rowstron, and Ioan Stefanovici
This research paper was presented at the 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (opens in new tab) (SOSP 2023), the premier forum for the theory and practice of computer systems software. For millennia, data has woven itself into every…