Daily Dose / Aug 5, 2026 / Data

Half a Zettabyte
a Day

Humanity now creates, copies and consumes more data in twenty-four hours than existed in the entire world in 2005. The number is so large it has stopped meaning anything — so here it is broken into things you can hold: seconds, messages, watts, and the small fraction we actually bother to keep.

500million terabytes created every day

The world is on track to create, capture, copy and consume 182 zettabytes of data in 2025 (Statista / IDC Global DataSphere). Divided across the year that is roughly 499 million terabytes a day — about 5.8 petabytes every second, day and night, forever. daily & per-second figures derived from the annual total

01 The ladder of scale

Every rung is a thousand of the one below it

A zettabyte is not a big number the way a billion is a big number. It sits seven full ×1,000 steps above a kilobyte. Human intuition gives out somewhere around the fourth rung.

KILOBYTE

A text message, a paragraph of plain text

MEGABYTE

A phone photo, a minute of music

GIGABYTE

A feature film, a shelf of books

TERABYTE

A laptop drive; 1,000 GB

PETABYTE

A large research archive; 1,000 TB

EXABYTE

A hyperscale data centre; 1,000 PB

ZETTABYTE

1,000 EB. The world makes half of one every day

▸ONE DAY OF HUMANITY ≈ 0.5 ZB ≈ 500,000,000 TB ≈ 5.8 PB PER SECOND · rung examples are illustrative typical sizes, not measured values

02 The curve

Two zettabytes in 2010. Nearly four hundred by 2028.

Annual global data created, captured, copied and consumed. The line is not steepening because people type faster — it is steepening because sensors, video, replication and machine-generated logs now dwarf anything a human writes by hand.

03 One day on the network

What half a zettabyte actually looks like

Counted in messages sent and received each day. Note the horizontal scale is logarithmic — each gridline is ten times the last — because email still out-volumes everything else by two orders of magnitude.

Emails sent & received376,000,000,000 / day

WhatsApp messages100,000,000,000 / day

ChatGPT messages2,500,000,000 / day

1 BILLION10 BILLION100 BILLION1 TRILLION

Video

500 hours a minute

Uploaded to YouTube — roughly 720,000 hours a day, or 82 years of footage created every 24 hours. No human will ever watch a single day's upload. years-per-day derived

The pipes

1,835 Tbps

Total international internet bandwidth as of mid-2025 — the lit capacity of the submarine and terrestrial cables that carry it all, growing at a 24% four-year compound rate.

04 What we keep

Almost none of it is saved

The datasphere is mostly weather: created, consumed and gone. The world's entire installed storage capacity — every hard drive, SSD, tape and optical disc on Earth — could not hold a single year's output.

<2%

Retained

Share of the data created and replicated in 2020 that was still saved and retained a year later. The rest was ephemeral or overwritten. (IDC, 2021)

16 ZB

All the storage there is

IDC's forecast for the world's total installed base of storage capacity in 2025 — versus 182 ZB created in that year alone.

11×

The overflow

One year of new data now exceeds the planet's entire storage capacity by roughly eleven times. ratio derived from the two figures above

05 The power bill

Data is not weightless — it is electricity

Every byte moved or stored is a machine drawing current in a building somewhere. Data centres consumed about 415 TWh in 2024 — roughly 1.5% of the world's electricity — and the IEA's base case has that doubling by 2030.

Growth rate

≈15% a year

Data-centre electricity demand 2024–2030 — more than four times faster than the growth of electricity demand from every other sector combined. (IEA, 2025)

The accelerant

30% a year

Projected annual growth in electricity used by AI accelerator servers specifically, versus 9% for conventional servers. (IEA, 2025)

▸ Why it matters

The cheapest byte is the one you never make

Data feels free because the cost is paid somewhere you can't see: in a substation, a cooling tower, a rack of drives that will be landfill in five years. Three things follow from the numbers above.

Volume is not valueLess than 2% of what the world creates is worth keeping a year later. Default-on capture — every log, every duplicate backup, every 4K clip of a parking lot — is where most of the growth lives.
Delete is an energy policyStorage is not a one-time cost; idle data draws power every hour it exists. Clearing dead archives and duplicate copies is one of the few carbon reductions an ordinary organisation controls outright.
Ask where the power comes fromData centres double to ~945 TWh by 2030 either way. Whether that is a climate problem depends almost entirely on the grid it is plugged into — which is a siting and procurement decision, not a technical one.

Sources & notes

Statista / IDC Global DataSphere (2025) — volume of data created, captured, copied and consumed worldwide: 2 ZB (2010), 15.5 ZB (2015), 64.2 ZB (2020), 149 ZB (2024), 182 ZB (2025), 394 ZB (2028, projection).
Derived Daily and per-second rates (≈499 million TB/day; ≈5.8 PB/second) are the 2025 annual total divided evenly across the year — an average, not a measured instantaneous rate.
IDC, Global DataSphere / StorageSphere (2021) — less than 2% of the data created and replicated in 2020 was saved and retained into 2021.
IDC, Worldwide Global StorageSphere Forecast — installed base of storage capacity forecast to exceed 16 ZB by 2025 (from 7.9 ZB in 2021, ~19% CAGR). The 11× overflow ratio is our own arithmetic on the two figures.
International Energy Agency, Energy and AI (2025) — data centres consumed ~415 TWh in 2024 (~1.5% of global electricity), projected to reach ~945 TWh by 2030 (just under 3%) in the base case; ~15% annual growth, with accelerated servers at ~30% and conventional servers at ~9%.
The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report (via Statista, 2025) — ~376 billion emails sent and received worldwide per day in 2025.
Meta / Will Cathcart, Head of WhatsApp (2020) — more than 100 billion messages delivered per day on WhatsApp.
OpenAI & NBER working paper (Chatterji et al., 2025) — ~18 billion ChatGPT messages per week as of July 2025, equivalent to roughly 2.5 billion per day.
YouTube figures via Statista (2022) — ~500 hours of video uploaded every minute. The "82 years of video per day" figure is derived from that rate.
TeleGeography, Global Internet Geography (2025) — total international internet bandwidth of 1,835 Tbps as of mid-2025, a 24% four-year CAGR.
Illustrative The example file sizes on the ladder-of-scale strip (a text message, a phone photo, a feature film, a laptop drive) are typical round-number references for intuition, not measured values.