The most digits of pi ever computed

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314,000,000,000,000 digits

Held by StorageReview. Set 2025-11-19, and has stood for 342 days. Written down here 2026-09-16.

In 1993 this was 2,260,000,000 digits - a homemade parallel computer, set 1991-08. The figure above is about 140 thousand times that. Where that is checked.

Wikipedia's chronology of the computation of pi, read from the article's own table through the raw wikitext: the row for August 1991 reads 2,260,000,000 digits on a homemade parallel computer, and the next row is 18 May 1994, so that record stood through the whole of 1993. The table credits the Chudnovsky brothers; the fence names no person, so the holder is the machine, which the table itself describes only as homemade and unverified. This is a tertiary source, like the quantum-volume list, and is flagged as the weakest baseline on the site for the same reason: the publisher of the current record keeps no history this far back.

Nobody needs these digits. Forty of them would place a circle the size of the observable universe to within the width of an atom, and no use has ever been found for the rest. What the record measures is not mathematics but endurance. The formula has been known since the 1980s and the arithmetic is not in doubt, so the entire difficulty is whether a machine can shuffle several hundred terabytes back and forth for months without getting a single bit wrong. That is why it belongs here. It is the least forgiving test a large computer can be given - nothing to game, no partial credit, one answer that is either right or wrong all the way to the end - and it has to be proved rather than claimed, by computing the same digits again from a different formula and checking that they match. The asymmetry between those two jobs is the best thing on this page: the standing record took a hundred and ten days to produce and four and a half hours to check. In 1993, the year this site is pretending to be from, the record was counted in billions rather than trillions, and the machine that held it had been built by hand out of mail-order parts in a New York apartment.

That description was written when this frontier was opened, on 2026-09-16, and is never rewritten. Where it and the number above it disagree, the number is the reading and the description is history.

What counts

The verified world record for the decimal expansion of pi, as published on y-cruncher's records page: the Pi row of its summary table, taken from the Verified column and never the Unverified one beside it. The same page's log of record-size computations gives the date and the credit and marks the standing record in blue, and the two readings must agree. That log is read by sorting the digit column in a script rather than by taking the first row, because it is printed in announcement order and carries every constant the page tracks, not only this one. The date recorded is the day the computation was completed, not the day it was announced, which is usually weeks later. The holder recorded is the organisation the page credits; where it credits only individuals, the machine is named instead, because a record on this site is never held by a private person.

What moves it

A larger computation is completed, verified against a second and independent formula, and accepted onto that page as the world record.

Where to check it: https://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/records.html

Last checked: 2026-10-27. The source itself last measured this: 2025-11-19.

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