Biomemory says its first commercially available DNA storage device reached the public in 2023 as a 1KB DNA card with a minimum lifespan of 150 years, and it is now targeting a 2026 launch of Biomemory Prime, a data-center array with up to 100 petabytes of capacity, priced initially at about $150 per terabyte.[1][3] The company also says the 2026 system is intended for the estimated 10 million data centers worldwide, with write speeds of 2 to 3 megabytes per second and an access time of about 60 seconds via a separate reading module.[1]
Technically, this matters because DNA storage is being pushed from novelty artifact into rack-scale archival infrastructure: Biomemory’s roadmap calls for autonomous operation in 2026 and an exabyte-scale successor by 2030, with lower cost targets of about $1 per terabyte by 2030.[1][2] For lunar habitation, the key advantage is durability per unit volume and low-maintenance cold storage for irreversible knowledge: governance archives, engineering manuals, biological reference sets, and recovery blueprints can be preserved without continuous energy draw like active digital systems, reducing long-term fragility in a post-disruption environment.[1][4]
The Ark team should track three things: first, whether Biomemory delivers the 2026 end-to-end write/store/read product on schedule; second, whether the claimed 100PB-to-1EB roadmap and cost decline toward $1 per terabyte are validated in enterprise deployments; and third, whether the format becomes interoperable with archival standards for disaster recovery and cultural preservation.[1][2][4] The most useful integration path for the Lunar Ark is not bulk primary storage but sealed, redundant, read-optimized vaults for civilization-state datasets that must survive for centuries with minimal maintenance.[4]