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less damaging — but they can’t actually make them green. And the world’s voracious appetite for data is quickly canceling out any marginal improvements. For example, data centers are on track to account for 14% of all global emissions by 2040.

That’s equivalent to what the entire United States currently emits.

The real solution lies in completely rethinking how we store data.

Instead of storing it electronically, scientists are optimistic that we could soon encode data into strands of DNA, a vastly more powerful medium, on a massive scale.

DNA is orders of magnitude more efficient at storing information than any existing method. A single gram of DNA can store up to 215 million gigabytes of information; that’s equivalent to roughly 10 million copies of the entirety of Wikipedia. In theory, if DNA were used to its full potential, all of the world’s data could be stored in the bed of a semi-truck.

At Twist Bioscience, the company I lead, we developed a transformational process to “write” data onto small silicon chips using DNA. Our scientists recently stored a Netflix original series in synthetic DNA. And more recently, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in collaboration with our team, discovered a way to increase the efficiency of current DNA data storage methods by a factor of 100. Unlike servers in data centers, DNA-based storage methods are environmentally friendly. Once the information is converted into DNA, it consumes zero energy. That data also lasts much longer; while conventional magnetic hard drives wear out and need to be replaced every decade or so, data that’s been encoded in DNA could theoretically last for more than 500,000 years.

Our civilization is producing more data than ever.

Without new approaches, data storage threatens to worsen environmental crises and spawn new ones. And with hundreds of millions of new internet users added every year, the urgency couldn’t be greater. Approaches like DNA-based storage can help leverage the full promise and potential of the Information Age without sacrificing the planet’s health.

Emily Leproust is CEO and co- founder of Twist Bioscience. This piece originally ran in RealClearScience.

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