Member-only story
A Smear of DNA Can Hold 10,000 Gigabytes of Data
Facing a storage crisis, the U.S. is investing $48 million to turn DNA into living hard drives
Around the world, warehouses the size of several football fields store millions of hard drives’ worth of data. Every time we send an email, search Google, upload photos to Facebook, or stream a movie on Netflix — which is to say, all the time — those hard drives are put to work.
Big tech is building more of these sprawling data centers to keep up with the massive growth in data needs. But we are generating so much digital data that our current storage systems won’t be able to keep up for long. Already, large-scale U.S. data centers cost hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain and account for nearly 2% of the country’s electricity consumption, and those numbers are only expected to grow.
“There’s a problem coming where we’re going to have more data than we can store,” says Nicholas Guise, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute who works on cybersecurity. To solve it, he says, we’ll need to figure out how to store more data in less space.
The U.S. government, which also has a huge data storage problem, has just invested $48 million into one possible solution: storing data in DNA.
