The Future of Forever Storage
How Startups Are Rethinking the Shelf Life of Knowledge
This week, Cerabyte, a Munich-based startup, received a strategic investment from In-Q-Tel (IQT)—the venture arm of the U.S. intelligence community, known for backing foundational technologies like Palantir and Databricks.
IQT doesn’t invest lightly. It focuses on technologies with long-term strategic value for national security. Their interest in Cerabyte is a signal: long-term data storage is emerging as a critical bottleneck, and Cerabyte might have a breakthrough solution.
Why We Still Need Cold Storage
This approach is a direct response to the limits of current systems. Most people assume we’ve solved data storage with "the cloud," but behind it are sprawling data centers filled with physical hardware: hard drives, SSDs, and magnetic tapes. Those systems wear out. They require electricity to preserve data, and every few years, companies must migrate everything to new media just to avoid data loss. Energy costs balloon. Migration is constant. Electronic waste piles up.
Cerabyte is targeting this pain point head-on.
Cerabyte is building a new tier of storage for the yottabyte era. If they succeed, we’ll be talking about preserving the digital memory of civilization.
Today’s most durable storage systems, like LTO (Linear Tape-Open) tape, can hold data for 5 to 10 years until needing replacement. They're cheap up front but expensive to maintain over decades. LTO also stores data sequentially, making it slow to access specific files. Cerabyte’s robotic library, in contrast, can retrieve specific data tablets quickly and efficiently, offering the performance of disk with the permanence of stone.
The need for this kind of solution is growing fast. Governments, research labs, and enterprises are producing data at massive scale, often in the range of petabytes or exabytes. But storing it isn’t enough. This data must remain intact, secure, and accessible for decades.
Intelligence agencies face classification timelines of 25 to 50 years, requiring storage systems that can endure time, evolving threats, and shifting formats.
AI companies need to keep large training datasets available for retraining, audits, and regulatory compliance as governance standards evolve.
Scientific institutions must preserve high-value datasets such as genomic data, climate models, and experimental results for reproducibility & continued analysis.
Legal and government bodies must maintain access to contracts, documentation, and sensitive records that remain critical long after they’re created.
In each case, the problem isn’t just we need more than raw capacity. We need storage that is resilient, auditable, and built for long-term access.
The Tech: Ceramic Tablets & Laser Nanodots
Cerabyte has developed a system that writes data onto ultra-thin glass tablets coated with ceramic. They use femtosecond lasers (ultra-fast light pulses) to burn in nanoscale (microscopic) dots. These dots encode data permanently—no degradation, no rewrites, no power needed to maintain them.
The tablets are stored in a robotic library (automated shelves that retrieve and insert tablets on demand). Think of it as a cold-storage data warehouse, with the resilience of hieroglyphs and the automation of a cloud-scale data center.
Writes 2 million bits in one laser pulse
1GB per surface
Reading via high-speed microscopes
Resists heat, radiation, water, corrosion, and time
These tablets can last for 1,000 years or more without degradation. The process is precise, permanent, and requires no energy to preserve the data once it’s written. Retrieval takes seconds, rather than hours, and the medium itself is immune to environmental threats like heat, radiation, moisture, and corrosion.
Beyond Tape and Cloud: The New Contenders
So how does Cerabyte’s bet on permanence compare to the rest of the field? And with so many storage technologies being reimagined, how do we even know what’s worth betting on?
The truth is, there’s no shortage of ambition in the long-term storage space. But each approach comes with its own tradeoffs. While Cerabyte focuses on physical permanence and power-free durability, others are optimizing for scale, density, distribution, or novelty:
Multi-layer optical discs, like the ones being developed by Folio Photonics (Series A), aim to replace tape with familiar disc formats that pack in more data through stacked layers. They’re cheaper and easier to integrate into existing hardware, but require eventual migration and have slower access speeds.
Decentralized storage networks, like Protocol Labs’ IPFS, take a different approach altogether: splitting data across global nodes for resilience and redundancy. While useful for censorship resistance and public data, permanence depends on incentives and ownership. If nodes disappear, so does your data.
DNA storage, spearheaded by companies like Catalog DNA (Series B), might offer near-limitless density and millennia of stability. Data is encoded into strands of synthetic DNA—a medium with mind-bending density and theoretical shelf lives of thousands of years. (A gram of DNA can store hundreds of petabytes.) But for now, it’s mostly confined to labs, with extremely slow write times and high costs.
Glass-based 5D optical storage, like Microsoft’s Project Silica, is also experimenting with laser-written durability, using etched quartz glass to store data across multiple dimensions. It shares some durability goals with Cerabyte, but it’s still in R&D and lacks commercial infrastructure. (Microsoft hasn’t disclosed a timeline).
All of these efforts are part of the same race—one driven by the growing gap between how much data we generate, and how little of it we can reliably keep over time. The real question isn’t who has the flashiest tech, but who’s building the right balance of durability, cost, access, and simplicity for real-world use.
Cerabyte may not be alone in rethinking storage, but it’s one of the few placing a long-term, high-confidence bet on forgettability: write it once, and never touch it again. Whether that’s the winning formula or just one layer of the future stack remains to be seen.
How Will We Remember Civilization?
If Cerabyte seems like an edge case, consider who’s backing them. The company has already landed funding from the European Innovation Council’s €411 million accelerator program and secured a strategic investment from Pure Storage, which now holds a board seat. That’s Europe’s innovation engine and one of the biggest names in enterprise storage betting on the same vision. Add In-Q-Tel, the U.S. intelligence community’s venture arm, and you’ve got rare alignment across governments, hyperscalers, and national security—each signaling that we’re overdue for a new foundation beneath the world’s data.
This matters for everyone. If long-term storage doesn’t keep pace, the consequences hit everything from medical research and to the photos of your kids and the models running your favorite apps. We’ve built an ecosystem that’s good at capturing the now, but not so great at preserving the past. Terabytes disappear every day because no one budgeted for what comes after the upload.
Cerabyte isn’t trying to replace the cloud or kill tape. They’re building something else entirely: a new tier of storage for the yottabyte era. Durable, self-sustaining, and built to last longer than the systems that wrote the data in the first place. If they succeed, we won’t be talking about storage formats. We’ll be talking about preserving the digital memory of civilization.
Let me know what you're thinking—I’m watching this one closely.
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