As an irrational number, pi has no end – but that hasn’t stopped computer engineers from chasing the eternal string of decimals deeper into the unknown. Recently, the technology media company StorageReview has achieved a staggering new recordcalculates 314 trillion digits of pi on a single Dell PowerEdge R7725 server that ran continuously for nearly four months.
The result shows that in modern pi calculations, the real battle is no longer just about processor speed, but also storage space and efficiency. StorageReview’s Dell PowerEdge R7725 server had 1.5 terabytes of memory to get the job done.
The article continues below
An irrational arms race
Previous pi records have jumped fast in recent years, from Google Cloud’s ran into the 100 trillion digits in 2022 to StorageReview’s own 105 trillion digits and 202 trillion digits brands in 2024. In April 2025, Linus Media Group and Kioxia stole the crown by calculating pi to 300 trillion digits – but StorageReview reclaimed the record in November 2025.
The results were announced in time for Pi Day, March 14 (or 3/14) – a nod to the number’s famous first three digits (3.14). The day has become a light-hearted tribute to mathematics, marked by cake jokes, cake pieces, classroom competitions and a public fascination with a number that never ends.
Why pi is important
Pi is a key constant in mathematics, relating every circle’s circumference to its diameter. It appears in geometry, physics, engineering and statistics, appearing in everything from waves and trajectories to bridges, buildings and computer models. Most people encounter pi in school as a simplified number used to find the area or circumference of a circle. But for engineers and scientists it is a building block that helps describe how the physical world works.
Pi is considered an irrational number because it cannot be written as a simple fraction of two whole numbers. The decimal form never ends and never settles into a repeating pattern. Mathematician Johann Lambert was the first to prove that pi was irrational in 1761which shows that no fraction can exactly equal the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. So even though pi is an exact number, the decimal expansion is infinite.
All these digits are not strictly necessary for accurate calculations; NASA usually stops at 16 digits in his most accurate calculations about the universe. Nevertheless, researchers challenge themselves to calculate pi to more and more decimal places for several reasons. It’s a way to test the limits of computing, storage and software, as a large pi run can reveal hardware weaknesses better than many standard benchmarks. Calculating pi also helps researchers refine algorithms to handle other large calculations.
Then, of course, there is the fame of being the person who calculates pi to the most decimal places yet. To achieve the astonishing result of 314 trillion digits of pi, StorageReview provided around 280GB/s of bandwidth on its Dell server to handle the massive flow of intermediate calculations required for such a large series.
“If anyone wants to take the record, we’d love to see them take the whole thing: more digits, less power, shorter wall time and the same reliability with zero downtime,” the company said in the statement. “Until then, this is the benchmark for efficiency.”
