This ‘Tiny’ Breakthough Could Make AI Data Centers Obsolete and Change Digital Storage Forever 79%
By Popular Mechanics Editors97%
7/18/2026, 1:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Negativity Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 19.2% saturation with 138 hits. Analysis detected 1,477 faulty-reasoning hits from 720 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 71.9% and a BS Rank of 79% (3,706 of 17,611 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 79.00% of the article peer group.
The amount of information we have today is staggering.
The total data “created, captured, copied, and consumed in the world” was 59 zettabytes in 2020, according to physicist Melvin Vopson in an article he wrote for the World Economic Forum.
One zettabyte is 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits.
Much of our data is stored in data centers that take up the space of several football fields, consume staggering amounts of power and water, cost billions of dollars to run, and simply can’t keep up with the demand.
The International Energy Agency has warned that global electricity demand purely from data centers could more than double by 2030, to 945 TWh, the average total consumption of the country of Japan—due in part to the power demands of artificial intelligence technology.
In fact, power demands might cause blackouts in the U.S. to become 100 times more frequent by 2030, according to a July 2025 report from the United States Department of Energy.
Massive data centers also have a reputation for an unhealthy and polluting effect on the communities around them.
The next big breakthrough won’t just need to deliver superior data storage capability.
It needs to be clean.
That revolutionary technology may already have made its entrance.
Scientists have realized that the tiny molecules living things use to store their genetic information— deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA—could fit all that data in your coffee cup.
And store it for thousands of years.
While that reality is still theoretical, scientists first demonstrated using DNA to store data in the 1980s.
In 1999, researchers encoded a 23-character message into DNA; by 2013, the amount had jumped to 739 kilobytes and included text, images, and sounds.
In 2018, it exceeded 200 megabytes.
And in April 2025, the Library of Congress awarded a grant to write 1.5 GB of information in DNA.
The process involves converting data into binary language (the ones and zeroes that computers use) and then into sequences of DNA’s chemical bases (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine).
These bases are used to synthesize new DNA on an existing template.
A sequencer, which reads and converts the DNA back into digital data, retrieves the information.
That high density—coffee cup versus massive data center—is a big advantage over traditional storage.
“From what I know, DNA is the only material with the storage density and properties that could conceivably meet the hunger for data storage,” says Mark Bathe, PhD, professor of biological engineering at MIT.
“There is no other contender.
The molecule that nature chose for storing its information is a pretty incredible choice despite its current cost.”
Another is that storing DNA costs almost nothing.
According to researchers in Beijing, keeping 109 GB on tape for ten years costs $1 billion and uses hundreds of millions of kilowatts of electricity.
DNA storage could reduce that energy expenditure by three orders of magnitude.
“Once you make the DNA polymer, it doesn’t consume any energy,” Bathe says.
It can be stored for millenia at room temperature.
DNA is extremely stable, too.
“Under the proper conditions, it might be stable for hundreds of thousands of years plus,” says Jeff Nivala, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Paul G.
Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.
DNA in thousand-year-old fossils can still be read, and some research suggests DNA data could survive for a million years.
By contrast, tape is rated for only 10 to 30 years.
Further, DNA technology will never become obsolete.
Digital storage methods have constantly changed, rendering a lot of data pretty much inaccessible (think floppy discs).
But as long as DNA-based life exists on Earth, humans have strong incentives to maintain technologies to read and manipulate it.
While producing the DNA needs some breakthroughs in basic research and remains wildly expensive—the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies predicted synthesis falling to about $21,000 per MB of data by 2027—researchers aren’t giving up.
One reason for the high cost is the expensive chemicals required, according to Bathe, but he says that eventually, there’s “no doubt the cost is going to drop.”
That’s good news, because at some point, DNA technology could become a far more sustainable way to keep our digital lives going.
This story has reporting from Melissa Gaskill and Manasee Wagh.
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