“The Cloud” is basically just someone else’s computer, taking up acres of land and consuming cities’ worth of power, and billions of dollars in cost of ownership. It generates more carbon every year than the entire airline industry. The amount of data we produce each year as a species is growing exponentially, but our storage capacity is not. Hard drives not getting smaller–we’ve reached the physical limits of that. There are also serious concerns about the archival materials in the long term. Hard drives need to be replaced every 5 years, and magnetic tape can maybe last 30 years.

Catalog Technologies might be the solution to that. Their writer can write over a terabit of data onto DNA in a single day. The system is basically a printer, but instead of ink, it’s DNA. Not only can this store DNA, but it opens up new possiblities through which we interact with archival data: If you have millions of copies of your information (as DNA) you can operate on all of them in massively parallel ways.