Betamax vs VHS: European startup competes with Cerabyte to be first Exabyte-scale zero-power archival data storage system — but who will win?

• Ewigbyte combines optical read/write units with automated handling for large-scale archival
• Data is stored on inert media designed to resist environmental degradation
• Modular architecture allows scaling from petabytes to exabytes within deployments

European startup Ewigbyte has unveiled an exabyte-scale, zero-power archival storage system, entering the same emerging category as Cerabyte’s ceramic-based data storage technology.

Each company is pursuing long-term, energy-free data preservation aimed at hyperscalers, governments, and research institutions facing rapid archival growth.

Ewigbyte relies on ultra-stable physical encoding to retain data for centuries without electricity, cooling, or periodic data migration.

Modular architecture ...