Cerabyte recently conducted an experiment that seemed more like a culinary exercise than a technology showcase. The German storage startup plunged a sliver of its archival glass storage into a kettle of boiling salt water, then roasted it in a pizza oven.

Despite enduring temperatures of 100°C in the kettle and 250°C in the oven, the storage medium emerged unscathed, with its data fully intact. This experiment – along with a similar live demonstration at the Open Compute Project Summit in Dublin – was not just a spectacle. It was Cerabyte's way of proving a bold claim: its storage media can withstand conditions that would destroy conventional data storage.

Founded in 2022, Cerabyte is on a mission to upend the world of digital archiving. The company's technology relies on an ultra-thin ceramic layer – just 50 to 100 atoms thick – applied to a glass substrate.

Using femtosecond lasers, data is etched into the ceramic in nanoscale holes. Each 9 cm² chip can store up to 1 GB of information per side, written at a rate of two million bits per laser pulse. Cerabyte claims the result is a medium as durable as ancient hieroglyphs, with a projected lifespan of 5,000 years or more.