Growing digital space and data centers: The Economist

The Economist

October 27th, 2012

A recent article in the Economist encouraged me to clip this sound byte:

The amount of data being generated is growing at an eye-popping pace: IBM estimates that 2.5 quintillion bytes are being created every day and that 90% of the world’s stock of data is less than two years old.

The article focuses on the implicit growth of data storage as the internet grows. The fact that 90% of the world's stock of data is less than two years old is truly mindblowing. I hesitate to state that it shows the exponential of growth of the internet because that would mean we're already reached a crescendo but perhaps growth will slow and stabilize. 

I think it's easy to think about the internet as not actually existing in physical space, but every bit of data that we save on the "cloud" of the internet is stored somewhere...including this blog.