Knowledge · The Global Datasphere

Data Created per Year

Everything created, captured, copied, and consumed in a year: 2 zettabytes in 2010, 64 by 2020, a projected 181 for 2025.

• 32× measured 2010–2020, doubling ~2yr
• Most bytes are copies, not originals
• Modelled from 2021, and revised up since
• Only a fraction is ever stored

IDC’s Global DataSphere measures how much data the world creates, captures, copies, and consumes each year. That figure runs from 2 zettabytes in 2010 to 64.2 for 2020, a 32-fold rise across the measured decade that doubles roughly every two years, and on to a projected 181 for 2025. Video drove the first decade; sensors, cloud replication, and now AI training and inference drive the current one, and most bytes are copies rather than originals. Almost none of it is kept. The world’s installed storage holds only a small fraction of what flows through it each year, which makes this a consumption curve, not an archive. In practice it is the demand side of half the curves on this site, from HDD cost to submarine cables to mobile traffic.

One caveat: the DataSphere is a forward-looking IDC model rather than a measurement, and IDC revises it with each release. The line here splices three of those vintages. 2010-2019 is read off the bar chart in IDC’s November 2018 Data Age paper, whose bars carry no printed values and in which 2019 was still a forecast; 2020 is the 64.2 ZB that IDC’s March 2021 release states outright, and the last measured figure on this line; 2021-2024 appear in no IDC release at all and are 64.2 ZB compounded at that release’s stated 23% CAGR, as is the 181 for 2025, which that release does not name; and 2026 is the 221 ZB from IDC’s May 2022 forecast. So everything after 2020 is drawn dashed, flagged as projected in the CSV and JSON, and kept out of the doubling time, the leaderboard and the scatter.

Every revision since has run higher: IDC’s current June 2026 forecast puts 2025 at 218.4 ZB and 2030 at 718.5 ZB, about 21% above the 181 plotted here. Read the shape, not the level.

Source: IDC Global DataSphere (via Statista)

Download the data: global_datasphere.csv · global_datasphere.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.