Worldwide Data Storage

[Hornbein]

I made a superficial two hour investigation into this, navigating their weird terminology (Yottabyte and so forth) of which reader shall be spared and shamelessly relying on AI. I have little faith in these estimates, but this is what They are saying.

Data storage

	Bytes	Cost/year	Revenue/year
World Total	2.0*10^23	$200 billion	$500 billion
AI Total	1.5*10^22	$45 billion	$180 billion
YouTube	1.5*10^19	$2 to $5 billion	$60 billion
Consumer	1.0*10^11	$12	$0

Archival storage costs much less than ready access "hot" storage.
AI storage requires higher speed so yet more.

 

[jedishrfu]

It would’ve been nice to have provided those measurements in MB, GB, TB, PB, rather than YB.

Given the world total of 200 billion TB annually, AI makes up roughly 10% of that total 20 billion TB while YouTube takes up 20 million TB and the lowly consumer 1 GB.

Do we have info on the missing dark data? Or on scientific data?

It would be interesting to factor in scientific data, data communication and compression capabilities and backups too.

Scientific data can be very difficult to compress. There's data compression test data at SDR benchmarks with compression stats.