How Much Data
Is Created Every Day?

Using IDC's 2024 global datasphere estimate cited by the ITU and UNESCO Broadband Commission, we calculate that about 408.2M TB of data is created, captured, copied, and consumed every day.

• The annual baseline is 149 ZB of data in 2024.
• That equals about 408.2 EB per day, or 0.408 ZB per day.
• In bytes, the same daily average is about 408.2 quintillion bytes per day.

This is broader than human-written content. It includes copied files, machine logs, video streams, cloud backups, sensor data, AI activity, business records, messages, and short-lived data that may never be stored permanently.

That is why this page separates data from content. Content is the human-readable layer people post, send, watch, search, and share. Data is the full digital exhaust behind those actions.

The daily number is only a snapshot. IDC's longer forecast, cited in the 2025 ITU and UNESCO Broadband Commission report, shows a much larger growth curve.

• IDC estimated 149 ZB of global data in 2024.
• IDC projected global data creation to exceed 394 ZB+ by 2028.
• That forecast implies about 164% growth from 2024 to 2028.
• IDC analysis cited in the same report says about 90% of the world's data has been generated within the past two years.

The growth is driven by more connected people, more connected devices, richer media, enterprise cloud systems, AI workloads, and data copied between systems for analysis, backup, delivery, and compliance.

Domo's Data Never Sleeps series is useful for understanding the content layer of the datasphere. The numbers are not added together to create the main daily estimate, but they show where visible digital activity comes from.

• Domo reported a record 5.52B internet population in its Data Never Sleeps 12.0 release.
• Domo's Data Never Sleeps 12.0 award note said 251.1M emails are sent every minute.
• The same Domo note said 138.9M Facebook and Instagram Reels are viewed every minute.

Those activity stats make the daily data figure easier to understand. A minute of online life contains messaging, search, streaming, ecommerce, collaboration, media playback, and background platform activity at the same time.

AI is now one of the clearest reasons data creation keeps getting harder to summarize. It creates prompts, responses, embeddings, logs, model outputs, synthetic media, evaluations, and workflow records.

• Domo's 2025 AI Edition reported that global AI spend reached more than $1.21M+ every minute.
• The same report said AI spend per minute increased by 312% from the prior year.

This does not mean AI is the whole datasphere. It means AI is adding a fast-growing layer on top of already large video, messaging, cloud, enterprise, and device-generated data streams.

The most important measurement boundary is the definition of data. The IDC/ITU definition covers data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally. It is not limited to public internet posts or files people intentionally upload.

• Created data includes new files, messages, media, records, AI outputs, and machine logs.
• Captured data includes sensor readings, transactions, location signals, analytics events, and device telemetry.
• Copied data includes backups, cloud replication, cached files, mirrored datasets, and data moved between services.
• Consumed data includes streamed media, searches, app activity, collaboration, and content views.

For related benchmarks, see our website statistics, mobile marketing statistics, and video marketing statistics.