Welcome to Zettabytes!
A new Substack on the world of high-scale data & AI — with a personal twist
Hello and welcome to the premiere post of Zettabytes, a new Substack blog devoted to all things data and AI — multimodal, vectors, structured, unstructured, metadata, and “human data.” Also databases, data clouds, data lakes, data warehouses.
You may be thinking, “Wait, don’t you already write about all of those things in the Cloud Database Report?”
Yes, but Zettabytes is going to be broader in scope. I plan to use AI as a creative, research, and writing assistant. But I will remain the human in the loop.
Why the name Zettabytes?
As a refresher, data scalability looks like this: kilobytes (a thousand bytes), megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes. Each is 1,000 times greater than the previous one. Actually, it’s 1,024 times more, but that’s generally considered a rounding error.
Today, most tech professionals deal with data volume in terabytes, petabytes, and at the extreme, exabytes. I recently heard a Microsoft VP say Microsoft manages 30 exabytes in its Azure Data Platform. That’s data at mega scale.
Zettabytes are next. A zettabyte is a thousand exabytes, a million petabytes, a billion terabytes. No one really knows how many zettabytes of data exist in all the data centers across the world. Perplexity puts the total at 149 ZBs to 200 ZBs globally.
I believe Zettabytes are going to become mainstream sooner than many realize. Hence, that the moniker of this newsletter.
ChatGPT puts the compound annual growth rate of data creation globally at 23% to 27% over the past 10 years. It’s a safe bet that AI training and generation may accelerate that even more. See the blog post below for my reasoning on that.
So this new Substack newsletter is pinned to what I believe will be a far-reaching, disruptive trend in business, IT, and among the hyperscalers — AWS, Google, and Microsoft. Look no further than the global buildout of AI data centers to see that this trend is underway.
What to expect
My other newsletter, the Cloud Database Report, is mainly focused on database platforms and platform providers. Zettabytes will continue to cover the database market, while expanding into other areas.
In addition to being a life-long tech journalist, I’m an English major and documentary photographer. So I plan to have some fun with this. Please subscribe, share, and connect with me on LinkedIn.