How many exabytes of data are created worldwide each day?

How to get close to this number

Work from video. Most of the world's data volume is video — surveillance, streaming, uploads, calls — and video is enormously larger per minute than anything else. Billions of people generating and receiving video continuously produces a daily figure in the hundreds of exabytes.

The recurring claim in the explanation is the one worth pulling apart: ninety percent of all data was created in the last two years. That has been true continuously for over a decade, which means it is not a statement about a recent event but a description of exponential growth — at a high enough growth rate, the recent past always dominates the total.

It also means the statistic conveys less than it appears to. A figure that is always true tells you the growth rate is steady rather than that something has changed. The interesting question is not how much data exists but how little of it is ever read, which is the same shape as the Spotify and Steam questions on this site.