In the last eleven years, the generated volume of data grew by almost 5000% worldwide. And if someone would download all the information from the web today, it would take approximately 181 million years.

Despite these numbers being quite substantial, only 10% of the data we have today is original. The rest is copied and replicated. In fact, it’s predicted that the unique and copied information ratio will change from 1:9 to 1:10 by the end of 2024.

Internet users spent around 2.8 million years online in 2018, generating more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. This number just keeps growing, as it was found that in 2020, internauts created 1.7 megabytes of information every second, totaling 40 zettabytes that year.

How do we do it? Well, WhatsApp users alone exchange more than 65 billion messages and complete 55 million video calls daily. The app allows more than 1 billion groups to connect and interact with each other, generating large amounts of data. 

According to 2023 statistics, Facebook produces 4,000 terabytes each day and ranks as the most visited site worldwide. Meanwhile, X accumulates 500 million posts daily, totaling 560 gigabytes of information. And the young people’s favorite app, TikTok, averages 7.35 terabytes of data each day. 

Before most of this information is stored away, it’s converted into numbers 1 and 0. When it’s changed into symbols that computers can process quicker, it can be stored away in one of three locations. First are devices that can be linked to the internet, like our personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and other similar technologies. 

The second is called the edge, which already includes bigger infrastructures like cell towers and servers used in institutions like universities, government offices, factories, and banks. The third location that stores the most amount of data is known as the core, which are traditional data servers and cloud data centers.

The largest data center in the world belongs to China Telecom Data Centre, in Hohhot. It occupies 10.7 million square feet, equivalent to about 180 football fields. When we say that we store information in the cloud, it’s not being stashed away somewhere in the atmosphere. It’s being kept in massive data centers—physical objects that actually take up quite a lot of space on our planet. 

Since data generation is ever-growing, to meet the demand for storage, around 100 new data centers are built every two years. It’s estimated that if it continues to increase at the rate it is now, to sustain it, in 110 years we’ll need all the planetary power we consume today.