DNA Data Storage: Market Trends You Need To Know

What Is DNA Data Storage?

There is a huge gap in data storage looming: the world is generating too much data to keep up. Because of this gap, by 2022, as much as 50% of the data generated every year will not be stored. At the same time, revolutionary advances in DNA read and write technologies have occurred, making these technologies faster and lower-cost.

The convergence of these factors is driving interest in DNA data storage. DNA has inherent advantages as a storage media, including extremely high storage density, no risk of obsolescence and ease of long-term storage. The main bottlenecks include storage costs, coding schemes and rapid access to and reading of the stored data.

As Dr. Hanlee Ji, Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford University, says, “It is estimated that 44 trillion gigabytes of data were generated in 2020. In the era of big data, more is considered better and what that practically means is that there are huge amounts of data that need to be stored, managed and potentially analyzed. If you look at the supply of current microchips, this amount of data clearly exceeds the supply that we can currently generate based on microchip-grade silicon. This represents a potential dilemma for maintaining humanity’s history.”

DNA data storage is the process of encoding and decoding binary data to and from synthesized strands of DNA or RNA. It has the potential to exponentially increase data storage capabilities, and can also theoretically be preserved indefinitely. As of this writing, high cost and slow read and write times are keeping this from the mainstream. But, like all other information storage hurdles in the past, DNA data storage will get smarter, cheaper and faster.

DNA data Storage Trends And Projections

The overall global market was $36.4 million in 2020 and is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 70.6% to reach a forecast market size of $525.3 million by 2025.
The DNA data storage market can be segmented by the DNA synthesis technology employed: enzymatic or chemical (phosphoramidite) based.
The phosphoramidite-based (chemical) synthesis market was $28.4 million in 2020 and is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 68% to reach $380.3 million by 2025.
The enzymatic-based synthesis market was $8 million in 2020 and is growing at a CAGR of 78.5% to reach a forecast value of $145 million by 2025.
The primary end users for DNA data storage systems in 2020 are government/defense, with multiple research and prototyping projects.