From Nerd Dream to World Record: How Linus Tech Tips and KIOXIA Just Rewrote Pi History (to 300 Trillion Digits!)

If you thought calculating pi was something you left behind in high school math, think again—because Linus Media Group, the brains behind Linus Tech Tips (LTT), just teamed up with tech giant KIOXIA to make history by calculating pi to an earth-shattering 300 trillion digits.

That's not just pushing the limits. That's nuking them with a high-speed NVMe-powered rocket.

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Wait... What’s the Big Deal with Pi?

Before we dive into the juicy tech details, let’s set the stage: π (pi) is the mathematical constant that defines the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It's irrational, meaning it has no end and no repeating pattern—just an infinite string of numbers marching onward into eternity.

For centuries, humans have obsessed over pi, not just for academic curiosity, but also to test the limits of math, computation, and storage technology.

And now, thanks to this record-breaking collaboration, we’ve gone light-years further than ever before.

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Why Linus? Why KIOXIA?

This wasn't your average YouTube stunt. It was a full-blown Guinness World Record backed by serious tech clout.

• KIOXIA, formerly Toshiba Memory, brought their enterprise-class NVMe SSDs to the table—storage beasts that could write data faster than most people can type “what is pi?”

• Linus Media Group, known for turning nerdy tech into mainstream fun, took this challenge not only to showcase KIOXIA’s SSDs, but also to create one of the most ambitious computing projects ever documented on YouTube.

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The Iron Behind the Infinite: Let’s Talk Hardware

If this record-breaking pi calculation were a Hollywood blockbuster, the hardware would be the unsung hero—the muscle-bound protagonist grinding through the math while staying cool under pressure (well... mostly cool).

Here’s what powered the madness:

Processors (a.k.a. The Brainstormers)

• 2 x AMD EPYC 9684X CPUs

• That’s 192 cores in total, chewing through threads like a woodchipper at a lumberjack festival.

• These aren’t your average desktop CPUs—these monsters are made for hyperscale data centers, not YouTube labs.

  

  

Memory (a.k.a. Short-Term Genius)

• 3 Terabytes of DDR5 ECC RAM

• ECC (Error-Correcting Code) ensures that no sneaky cosmic rays or electrical gremlins flip bits and ruin months of calculation.

• To put it in perspective, 3 TB of RAM is enough to run almost the entire internet—okay, maybe not, but it feels that way.

Storage (a.k.a. The Unsung Gladiators)

• Total: 2.2 Petabytes (yes, peta, not tera)

• Composed of:

  • 80 x 15.36 TB KIOXIA CM7 NVMe SSDs

  • 32 x 30.72 TB KIOXIA CM7 NVMe SSDs

• 

  These enterprise-grade SSDs didn’t just store data—they survived over 100 GB/s of sustained read/write throughput for 7 months.

• Fun fact: Not a single drive failed. Not one.
  That’s like running a 200,000 km endurance race and all your tires stay brand new.

Cooling (a.k.a. The Problem Child)

• Despite all that muscle, thermal management turned out to be one of the biggest hurdles.

• The team faced heat waves, cooling malfunctions, and HVAC bottlenecks, leading to 96 days of downtime.

• In short: the hardware could go the distance—but the room it was in had to keep up.

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225 Days. 96 Days of Downtime. 1 Final Digit.

The calculation itself started in August 2024 and wrapped up in April 2025, taking 225 days—including 96 days of downtime caused by things like cooling issues, power outages, and probably a few existential crises.

Still, it all led to one poetic moment:

The 300 trillionth digit of pi is... 5.

Was it worth it? Absolutely.

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The YouTube Episode That Took Years (and Probably Some Sanity)

If you’ve followed Linus Tech Tips since the early “Why is he yelling about this $80 motherboard?” days, watching this video feels like watching your childhood nerd-hero go full mad scientist—with a camera crew.

The LTT video chronicling the pi world record isn’t just another tech breakdown. It’s part heist film, part science fair, and part group therapy session for everyone involved. There’s drama. There’s failure. There’s Linus dramatically questioning life choices while surrounded by walls of SSDs and server racks that sound like jet engines.

And of course, there’s Linus himself, the eternal mix of chaotic energy and genuine passion, admitting—half-laughing, half-sobbing—that they poured what felt like a million dollars into the gear, labor, and sheer willpower needed to pull this off. Whether that number is literal or exaggerated for comic effect doesn’t even matter—because after watching the rollercoaster of this project, you believe it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4ukIwpHvTE

For fans who’ve been watching LTT for years (like me and probably you), this episode hits different. You remember the early office, the basement setups, the early collabs with questionable audio. And now? They're literally making math history. It’s wild. It’s inspiring. It’s... somehow still held together with Velcro straps and zip ties.

More than a documentary, the video is a love letter to curiosity, the messy beauty of engineering, and the idea that failure isn’t the opposite of success—it’s the road that gets you there. You’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, you’ll maybe tear up when Anthony says something quietly profound in the middle of a tech rant.

This wasn’t just a YouTube video. It was a multi-year quest filled with heatwaves, firmware bugs, server room panic attacks, and more troubleshooting than any mortal should endure.

And they captured it all—for the content.

So if you haven’t seen it yet: grab snacks, cancel your evening plans, and prepare to witness the geekiest underdog story of the decade. Linus and the crew went there—and they brought us all along for the ride.

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The Math Software Behind the Mayhem: y-cruncher

All of this would’ve been impossible without y-cruncher, a multi-threaded program designed for extreme high-precision number crunching. It’s basically the Formula 1 car of math software—and it was pushed to its absolute limit here.

source: https://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/

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But... Why Calculate Pi This Far?

You might be wondering: what’s the practical point of knowing 300 trillion digits of pi?

Well, besides testing hardware reliability, computational stability, and data throughput, these mega-calculations help engineers and scientists refine systems that will power AI, simulations, encryption, and even space exploration.

Also... because it's really, really fun for people who love pushing boundaries.

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What This Means for the Future of Tech

This isn't just about pi. It’s a proof of concept for what's possible when high-end consumer media collides with cutting-edge enterprise technology. It shows:

• How far NVMe storage has come

• What kind of reliability and endurance modern hardware can achieve

• That YouTube creators can meaningfully contribute to technological progress

It’s a wild, wonderful marriage of nerd culture and industrial-grade computing.

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Final Thoughts

The LMG x KIOXIA pi project isn’t just a tech flex—it’s a powerful statement about what can happen when you pair relentless curiosity with world-class engineering. Sure, on the surface, calculating 300 trillion digits of pi might sound like a mathematical marathon with no real finish line. But look a little deeper, and you’ll find a story of ambition, endurance, and the relentless human drive to push boundaries simply because we can.

In an era dominated by cloud computing, AI models, and virtual everything, this project brought things back to the bare metal—raw computation, extreme I/O, thermal challenges, and long nights watching logs scroll past. It wasn’t done in a remote server farm or hidden behind an API. It was done with hands-on hardware, sweat, setbacks, and a whole lot of SSDs.

And that’s what makes it special.

This was a celebration of nerd culture at its finest—the kind where people go to absurd lengths just to see what happens when you calculate pi to a few hundred trillion digits more than anyone else. It was impractical. It was over-the-top. It was... kind of beautiful.

Because sometimes, the greatest breakthroughs don’t come from solving world hunger or decoding alien languages—they come from people asking, “What if we just tried it?”

The 300 trillionth digit of pi is... 5.
There was no parade. No fireworks.
Just the quiet satisfaction that after 225 days, 2.2 petabytes of SSDs, and zero drive failures, the universe handed back a single digit.
And in that tiny, anticlimactic moment, there’s a kind of magic.

The real achievement isn’t just in the number—it’s in the journey that got us there.

So here’s to the dreamers, the tinkerers, the engineers, and the geeks who see a blank rack of servers and think: “Let’s make history.”

And next time someone asks why you’d ever calculate pi that far, you can smile and say:

Because we could. And it was awesome.

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