Exabit to Exbibyte

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.

EB (exabyte) = 10¹⁸ bytes (SI decimal). EiB (exbibyte) = 2⁶⁰ bytes = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes (IEC binary). EiB is 15.29% larger. This is the largest practically significant SI vs IEC discrepancy: per exbibyte, the binary value exceeds the decimal value by approximately 152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes — about 152.9 petabytes.

One exbibyte (EiB) ≈ 1.153 × 10¹⁸ bytes = 1,073,741,824 GiB = 1,048,576 TiB. In practical terms: enough to store approximately 230 billion JPEG photos at 5 MB each, or 288,230,376 copies of a 4 GB HD movie, or the entire text content of the English internet many thousands of times over.

In theory, yes — and with astonishing density. DNA can encode about 215 PiB per gram of material, meaning a single EiB could fit in roughly 4.7 grams of synthetic DNA. Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington have demonstrated writing and reading megabytes of data in DNA strands. The challenges are speed and cost: current DNA synthesis writes about 400 bytes per second and costs around $3,500 per megabyte. At that rate, writing 1 EiB would take billions of years and cost more than global GDP. However, enzymatic synthesis breakthroughs could reduce costs by 6–8 orders of magnitude within decades.

Storing 1 EiB on modern HDDs would require roughly 57,000 drives of 20 TB each, consuming about 400–500 kW of power just for the drives — plus 200–300 kW for cooling, networking, and overhead. That totals roughly 6 GWh per year, equivalent to powering about 550 US homes. At typical US grid carbon intensity, this produces around 2,500 tonnes of CO₂ annually. Hyperscale operators reduce this via renewable energy and immersion cooling, but the fundamental physics of spinning magnetic platters or maintaining NAND charge states sets a floor on energy consumption that no software optimisation can eliminate.

After exbibyte (EiB, 2⁶⁰ bytes) come: zebibyte (ZiB, 2⁷⁰ bytes) and yobibyte (YiB, 2⁸⁰ bytes), as defined in IEC 80000-13. These are recognized standard units but have no current practical applications. The entire global internet's estimated stored data (hundreds of EB) is still in the low hundreds of EiB range — well short of one ZiB.