Cerabyte, Inc. announced its participation in the 2026 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, October 12–15 in San Jose, California, where it will demonstrate a digitally restored copy of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis preserved on Cerabyte ceramic data storage.
Nearly a century ago, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis imagined a future shaped by robots, synthetic identities and mass manipulation influencing generations of science fiction, from Star Wars and Blade Runner to The Matrix. As the film approaches its centenary, Cerabyte is using it to pose a distinctly modern question: How will the enormous volumes of digital information being created today remain accessible, and unaltered for the next hundred years?
The question extends far beyond cinema. As AI accelerates data creation, hyperscale infrastructure must address not only how quickly information can be processed, but how economically and sustainably it can be retained. Cerabyte believes this requires storage designed from the outset for permanence and immutability.
To make that challenge a reality Cerabyte preserved a digitally restored copy of Metropolis on its ceramic on glass storage media, designed to keep the film intact for centuries. Unlike conventional storage technologies that require ongoing power, media replacement, data migration and integrity management, Cerabyte is designed to retain data without consuming energy during storage.
“Our goal goes beyond storing data. It is about ensuring that enormous volumes of data can be retained sustainably and economically for generations,” said Christian Pflaum, CEO of Cerabyte. “Metropolis makes that challenge tangible. A film that imagined the future a century ago allows us to ask a fundamental question today: will the digital information we are creating now still be accessible and authentic a century from now?”
At the OCP Innovation Village, Cerabyte will demonstrate how content stored on its ceramic media can be independently read using optical imaging, including with a smartphone.
Permanent storage can reduce the recurring burden of replacing media, migrating data and continuously maintaining information that may need to remain available for decades or longer. Cerabyte’s ceramic-on-glass technology is designed for long-term, immutable data retention across applications including AI infrastructure, digital preservation, scientific and medical research, hyperscale computing and organizations managing petabyte- to zettabyte-scale datasets.
The OCP Global Summit, themed Scaling Innovation for the AI Era, brings together global technology leaders working on the infrastructure required for the next generation of computing. Topics include AI infrastructure, data center sustainability, energy efficiency, secure hardware, open standards and technologies designed to operate on an unprecedented scale.
