Cerabyte. Forever Data Storage At A Fraction Of Current Costs?

meanwhile, magnetic tape storage continues to evolve...

On May 15 2025, Western Digital announced a strategic investment into a data storage startup called Cerabyte, details here.

Cerabyte, the pioneer of ceramic-based data storage solutions, today announced a strategic investment from Western Digital Corp, a leading developer and manufacturer of storage solutions, including hard disk drives.

The partnership will accelerate the development of Cerabyte’s ground-breaking ceramic data storage technology, designed to meet the growing demand for permanent accessible long-term data storage in existing and new use cases.

If you’ve never heard of Cerabyte, you’re probably not alone. The company is just three years old and is headquartered in Munich, Germany. Initially the company received funding through the Intel Ignite accelerator program and in December 2024, the were awarded a grant from the European Innovation Council, details here.

The EIC Accelerator is overseen by the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency. Cerabyte was one of 68 startups across different industries to share a total of €411 million ($426 million) in funding.

According to the company, their solution will revolutionise long-term data storage, details here:

Cerabyte's solution can store data for virtually unlimited time and reduce data center storage total cost of ownership (TCO) by orders of magnitude. Due to its media longevity and rapid access, Cerabyte also solves the challenges of long-term archival data storage, enabling the implementation of fast-retrieval active archive solutions and eliminating the need to periodically migrate data from one media to another.

More specifically, Cerabyte has a stated vision of achieving $1 per petabyte per month, a cost reduction of 1000x within the next two decades. That’s a bold vision, albeit the two decade long period of time allotted to achieving it does leave plenty of wiggle room if things don’t according to plan.

So what is this storage technology touted by Cerabyte, why do we need it and what would technology would it theoretically replace ? Let’s dig in….