It is indeed true that 90% of the world's current data was created in just the last 2 years.
The phrase "90 % of the world's data was created in the last 2 years" is a statistic that is widely cited and is used often for illustrating the exponential and explosive growth of digital information being created.
The phrase "90% of the world's data was created in the last 2 years" has been very accurate or even very close to accurate for over a decade.
Everyday and every second, minute, hour etc, data is constantly being created and uploaded to the internet and stored on servers.
New data centers are also being created to store all this data.
YouTube for example, sees over 720,000 hours of video uploaded per day, which is around 20 million new videos being added every day.
The amount of videos uploaded to YouTube in a day equates to over 500 hours of new content being uploaded to YouTube every single minute.
That is a lot of data and so much video is being uploaded to YouTube that it would take several lifetimes to watch it all.
As of May 2026, the amount of data being stored on the internet globally continues to double roughly every 3 years to 4 years and will continue to double.
YouTube, social media, IoT devices like smart homes/smart watches, streaming services, AI training datasets, and internet browsing as well as cloud storage also contribute to the massive daily creation of internet data.
It's also estimated that the World generates over 400 million terabytes of data every single day, and a significant amount of that data is being unstructured data like photos, audio and video.
A large portion of this internet data is also duplicated, temporary or even unstructured, like streaming, logs, selfies etc instead of just curated information.