Exabit to Exabyte

One exabit = 10¹⁸ bits = 125,000 terabytes = 125 petabytes. If every person on Earth (8 billion people) each stored 15 GB of data — roughly a modern smartphone's photos and messages — the total would be about 120 exabytes, or about 960 exabits. The entire human genome is about 1.5 GB; sequencing every person on Earth would produce about 12 exabytes of data.

Cisco's annual internet traffic reports estimated global IP traffic at roughly 4.8 exabytes per day in 2022, rising about 20% per year. Expressed in bits, that's about 38 exabits per day or roughly 440 petabits per second continuously. Video streaming accounts for over 60% of total internet traffic volume.

Data gravity is the principle that massive datasets attract applications, services, and additional data toward them — rather than being moved to where processing occurs. At exabit scale, physically transferring data becomes impractical: moving 1 exabit over a 100 Gbps link takes 116 days. Instead, companies deploy compute resources alongside the data. This effect drives cloud concentration — once an organisation stores exabits in AWS or Azure, the cost and latency of moving that data elsewhere creates powerful vendor lock-in, shaping the economics of the entire cloud industry.

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA), under construction in Australia and South Africa, will be the world's largest radio telescope. Its thousands of antennas will collectively produce roughly 1 exabit of raw sensor data per day — more than the entire global internet traffic of the early 2000s. This data cannot be stored in full; instead, on-site supercomputers reduce it by a factor of ~10,000 in real time, keeping only scientifically relevant signals. The SKA illustrates how radio astronomy pushes data processing to extreme scales that rival commercial internet infrastructure.

At 1 Gbps (a fast home connection), downloading 1 exabit would take 1 billion seconds — about 31.7 years. At 1 Tbps (a high-end data center link), it would take 1 million seconds, or about 11.6 days. This illustrates why exabit-scale data movements require massively parallel infrastructure — no single link or device handles exabit transfers directly.

One exabyte = 1,000,000 terabytes = 1,000 petabytes. If you filled 1 TB external hard drives and stacked them end to end, 1 EB worth would stretch roughly 200 km. In content terms: 1 EB can store about 250,000 years of HD video, or about 100 billion hours of music at 128 kbps. All the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider per year is about 15 petabytes — still 67× less than one exabyte.

Global data creation, capture, copy, and consumption is estimated at roughly 2.5 exabytes per day (IDC 2023 estimate), growing roughly 23% annually. This includes IoT sensor readings, financial transactions, social media posts, surveillance camera footage, scientific instrument output, and all other digital activity. Most of this data is transient and never stored long-term.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud each store estimated tens to hundreds of exabytes of customer data in their cloud platforms. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) stores an estimated 100+ exabytes across all data types. The NSA's Utah Data Center is estimated to hold yottabytes in capability, though actual stored volumes are classified. Collectively, global cloud storage is in the hundreds-of-exabytes range.

An exabyte (EB) = 10¹⁸ bytes (SI decimal). An exbibyte (EiB) = 2⁶⁰ bytes = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes — about 15.3% larger. This is the largest practically relevant gap between SI and IEC units in storage contexts. For a data center procuring 10 EB of storage, the SI vs IEC difference represents about 1.5 EB of capacity discrepancy in the contract.

Data archaeology is the practice of recovering information from obsolete storage media and formats — 9-track magnetic tapes, 8-inch floppy disks, MiniDiscs, Zip drives, and early optical formats. The challenge is threefold: hardware to read the media no longer exists or is failing, file formats and encoding schemes are undocumented, and magnetic media degrade over time (tape has a 10–30 year shelf life). At exabyte scale, organisations like national archives face the prospect of vast digital collections becoming unreadable within decades. Active migration strategies — periodically copying data to current formats and media — are the only reliable defense, but the cost scales linearly with data volume.