One single gram of DNA can now store up to 155.8 exabytes of data, nearly reaching the physical limit of information density.
April 23, 2026
Original Paper
DNA storage approaching the information-theoretic ceiling
arXiv · 2604.20810
AI-generated illustration
The Takeaway
This storage capacity is roughly equivalent to the contents of the entire internet packed into a speck of biological material. Traditional hard drives degrade in a decade, but DNA remains readable for centuries even in harsh conditions. A new coding scheme has pushed this technology to the Shannon bound, which is the absolute theoretical ceiling for information efficiency. A tiny vial of fluid could eventually archive the entire history of human civilization for thousands of years.
From the abstract
Synthetic DNA approaches 227.5 exabytes per gram of storage density with stability over millennial timescales. Realising this capacity requires error-correction codes that recover data from substantial synthesis and sequencing errors. Existing codecs convert noisy sequencer output into discrete base calls before error correction, discarding probabilistic information about which positions are reliable. Here we present a coding scheme that retains the sequencer's per-position posterior distributio