A new super world record has been set—and it’s for a number we casually round off to 3.14. But this time, Pi has been pushed to its limit.
Tech YouTuber Linus Tech Tips, in collaboration with Japanese storage giant Kioxia, has officially calculated 300 trillion digits of Pi. The result is now recognised by Guinness World Records as the most accurate value of Pi ever computed, far surpassing the previous official benchmark of 62 trillion digits—and even beating the 202 trillion digit claim that had circulated within the computing community.
This wasn’t just another tech project. The feat was achieved using a $1 million high-performance storage cluster designed and built by Linus Media Group. At the core of the setup were 2.2 petabytes of Kioxia’s Gen 4 NVMe SSDs, which maintained sustained read/write speeds of over 100GB/s for nearly seven and a half months—with zero drive failures reported.
The cluster consisted of nine servers powered by AMD EPYC CPUs, 3TB of DDR5 ECC RAM, and Nvidia’s ConnectX networking cards. The storage was virtualised using WEKA’s distributed file system, tricked into thinking it had 18 nodes instead of 9, to optimise performance and parity.
To perform the actual calculation, the team used Y-Cruncher, a high-precision number-crunching application developed by Alexander Yee. The software treated SSD storage as extended RAM, creating up to 1.5PB of swap space for intermediate data.
The process wasn’t smooth sailing. Power outages, AC breakdowns, and restarts plagued the 190-day marathon, but the team recovered using automated checkpoints built into the system. And after all that… the 300 trillionth digit of Pi is 5.
Printing the digits on paper would take billions of pages, and from a practical standpoint, just a few digits of Pi are enough for most real-world applications.
But this wasn’t about practicality—it was about proving what’s possible when hardware, software, and sheer obsession align.
In an age where every keynote is about AI, this record is a refreshing reminder of what computing used to celebrate: raw performance, engineering finesse, and curiosity for its own sake.
As Linus puts it, this was never about the "why"—but the "why not."
And for that reason alone, the record—and the 300 trillion digits that came with it—are worth remembering.
