Data flows and the evolving regulatory environment

Global traffic from data centres is estimated to have increased fourfold since 2015 – from 5 zettabytes in 2015 to around 20 in 2021. To put that into perspective, a zettabyte is 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes (21 zeros), that is, a thousand exabytes, a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. There are 20 times more bytes of traffic from data centres than there are stars in the expanding universe.