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Skyrocketing hard drive and storage costs caused by the AI data center boom are making it more expensive and more difficult for digital archivists, academics, Wikipedia, and hobby data hoarders to save data and archive the internet. Specific drives favored by some high profile organizations like the Internet Archive have become far more expensive or are difficult to find at all, archivists said.
Over the last several months, prices for both consumer level and enterprise solid state drives, hard drives, and other types of storage have skyrocketed. As an example, a 2TB external Samsung SSD I purchased last fall for $159 now costs $575. PC Part Picker, a website that tracks the average price of different types of drives, shows a universal increase in storage prices starting in about October of last year. Prices of many of the drives it tracks have doubled or increased by more than 150 percent, and at some stores SSDs and hard drives are simply sold out. There is now even a secondary market for some SSDs, with people scalping them on eBay and elsewhere.
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, the most important archiving projects in the history of the internet, told 404 Media that the skyrocketing costs of storage is “a very real issue costing us time and money.”
“We have found that the preferred 28-30TB drives are just not available or at very high price,” Kahle said. “We gather over 100 terabytes of new materials each day, and we have over 210 Petabytes of materials already archived on machines that need continuous upgrades and maintenance, so we need to constantly get new hard drives.”
“We are fortunate to have an active community that donates to the Archive, and we are also looking for help from hard drive manufacturers in these difficult times. We are always looking for more help,” he added. “So far we have ways to work around these shortages, but it is a very real issue causing us time and money.”
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and various other projects, including Wikimedia Commons, an open repository of royalty free media, told 404 Media that the cost of storage has become a concern for the foundation’s projects as well.
“With over 65 million articles on Wikipedia alone, access to server and storage capacity is vital to us. We’ve certainly seen price increases since the end of 2025.These price increases are of concern to us, as with every other player in the industry. We see the primary impact in the purchase of memory and hard drives but also in terms of lead times on server deliveries and our capacity to place future orders,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told us. “The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit, and as such how we allocate budget is very carefully considered. We maintain our own data centers to serve our users from all over the world. We’re putting workarounds in place where we can, mainly involving being smart with how we prioritize investment in hardware, building in flexibility as well as extending the life of existing hardware where possible.”
Western Digital, one of the largest manufacturers of hard drives and other storage systems, said that it has essentially sold out of its 2026 inventory to enterprise clients, many of which run data centers. Micron, which made RAM and SSDs under the brand name Crucial, has exited the consumer market altogether because “AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”
The AI boom is thus harming critical archiving projects in multiple ways. As a reaction to AI companies indiscriminately scraping the entire internet to train their large language models, website owners have increasingly put up registration walls, blocked web scrapers by changing their robots.txt to disallow bots, and have otherwise attempted to stop bots from accessing their websites. Many of these websites have either accidentally or purposefully ended up blocking bots from the Internet Archive and other archiving projects. The Electronic Frontier Foundation suggested “blocking the Internet Archive won’t stop AI, but it will erase the web’s historical record.” Beyond that logistical challenge, archivists are now needing to make difficult decisions about how and what to archive because they are, in some cases, simply running out of storage.
Mark Phillips, a University of North Texas professor who helps runs the End of Term Archive, which archives government websites between changes in presidential administrations, told 404 Media that he has had to consider the price of infrastructure recently: “When we went to refresh some of our servers, the costs of the RAM and SSDs for those machines were a dramatic increase and made us rethink some of the capacity we were hoping to go with,” he said. “We have not had to do any major storage purchases in the past six months, and I hope that by the time we do the market will have leveled out a bit.”
The cost of storage has become a constant topic of discussion on Reddit’s r/DataHoarder community, where digital librarians and hobby archivists discuss different archiving setups; many posts are from people who say they have simply had to stop buying drives, have had to put their archiving plans on hold, or are looking to vent about the price of drives. Occasionally, there are posts from people who managed to find a large drive for a decent price on clearance or at a thrift store. Many of these posts are from people who say that they have essentially given up on archiving new content until prices go down:
- “I've decided to just call it quits for now. I don't really download much anymore. I just maintain my current data.”
- “Slim pickings currently. Check Facebook marketplace as occasionally a deal can be had there especially from people who accidentally bought a sas drive and can't use it.”
- “I'm looking for efficient ways to use older smaller drives that I have laying around doing nothing, because I need more space for backups. I can't see buying a 28tb drive right now. I've started adjusting my backup retentions to stretch the space I have.”
- “Bust out your wallet is the only way or try to ride this out and hope prices come down.”
- “You don't [buy new drives] right now. Better pray we actually get drives going forward.”
- “Every vendor i worked with offered me a dinner and told me wait when i asked for a rather large quote.”
- “Bwwaahahahahahahahahhahaha.....not until 2029...MAYBE. All the AI/datacenters have prepurchased hard drives.”
The question that seems to be on everyone's mind is how long will this shortage last, and will the price of storage ever go down again?
In another sign that the depravity economy has no bottom, Forbes published a story about a Louisiana man that killed 8 children over the weekend containing a box that asked readers to predict whether Congress would do anything about gun control. Citation Needed author Molly White first spotted the box and shared it on Bluesky.
On Sunday morning 31-year old Shamar Elkins killed eight children ages one to fourteen, including seven of his own kids, in a rampage across three locations in Shreveport, Louisiana. Police shot Elkins to death. The Forbes story summarized these events, aggregated the Associated Press and New York Times stories about the killings, and then asked readers to predict whether or not Congress will pass stricter gun laws.
“The New York Times reported his family members said he had mental health problems and had expressed suicidal thoughts,” Forbes said. And then, below that, a “ForbesPredict” box:
“Congress WILL/ WON’T pass new gun safety legislation before 31st December 2026?” The box said then asked readers to “make your prediction.” A green checkmark and red X pulsed in place. Sliding your cursor over each changes the construction of the sentence.
Forbes launched ForbesPredict in January as part of an effort to reverse declining traffic from search engines and keep users on its website longer. It’s a prediction market like Kalshi or Polymarket, but unlike those sites there’s no money to be won. “AI is fundamentally changing how people access information, and that shift is already starkly visible in publisher's traffic,” Nina Gould, Forbes’ Chief Innovation Officer said in a press release announcing ForbesPredict. “Our response isn’t to chase scale, but to deepen engagement. ForbesPredict gives our audience a reason to return, participate and invest their thinking—not just consume headlines.”
ForbesPredict is an attempt to gamify news consumption and keep users scanning the website. Rather than cash, players earn tokens. “Tokens that have no cash value but matter within the ForbesPredict ecosystem as a signal of judgment over time. The tokens unlock greater status, gameplay advantages, and non-monetary rewards along the way,” Gould told Publishing Insider in an interview about the launch of ForbesPredict.
As a new user who had not signed into Forbes.com, I had 800 tokens. A story about the horrifying murder of children in Louisiana invited me to predict the legislative future of gun control. It cost 100 tokens for me to predict that Congress will pass new gun laws by the end of 2026, an outcome ForbesPredict gave an 18 percent chance of happening.
For 10 tokens I could get a “hint” about potential outcomes before spending 100 to make a prediction. The next question asked if Trump would pardon Ghislaine Maxwell before the end of his term. Paying 10 tokens for the hint revealed that ForbesPredict users say there’s a 61 percent chance Trump WILL pardon Maxwell. According to the hints this is because Trump said he’s allowed to do it. There’s a daily login bonus of 800 tokens for anyone willing to make an account.
Websites like Polymarket and Kalshi allow people to bet on the outcomes of world events including of war and death. ForbesPredict is an ersatz version of Polymarket where no money changes hands and users spend tokens for clout internally on Forbes. It’s hard for me to picture the person who is interested in prediction markets without real money visiting Forbes daily to read watered down reporting from the Associated Press and New York Times and then clicking a little boxy like they’re playing Candy Crush with the news cycle.
Forbes built ForbesPredict in partnership with a company called Axiom. It’s an attempt to solve the very real problem of AI devouring traffic and referrals. “AI platforms are answering the questions your journalism used to answer, permanently restructuring how information flows,” Axiom’s website said. “The quiet hope that this was a fluke. The data says otherwise. The trajectory is clear.”
The trajectory is, indeed, clear. AI does seem to be restructuring how information flows on the internet. Forbes is making a bet that it can keep its digital business afloat by serving as a low-stakes prediction market for news junkies. It’s offering gambling without the stakes and the payout and it’s offering news without first hand reporting or new information. It remains to be seen if this will help it retain readers and keep people on the site.
Forbes did not return 404 Media’s request for a comment.
I’ve been curious about macrophotography for a while, and recently I got hold of some extension rings for my OM-20 to give it a try. I took them out with me on one of the first properly sunny days of the year, and snapped these photos I’m quite pleased with. Both were shot handheld, using the 7mm and 25mm extension rings for a combined 32mm extension.
đź“· Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 + 32mm extension
🎞️ SantaColor 100 (Kodak Aerocolor IV)
Technically these are not “true” macro photos, as the magnification factor between the subject and the image captured on the film negative is less than 1× (for this lens with the 32mm extension I’ve calculated the magnification to be somewhere around 0.8×). However, depending on the screen you’re using to view this post, the scans above are likely being displayed significantly larger than the 36×24mm film negative anyway, rendering the point somewhat moot.
Since taking these photos, I’ve also added a 14mm extension ring to my collection (all three can be seen in the photo up top). With the addition of the 14mm extension ring, the magnification I’m now able to achieve should theoretically extend slightly past the 1× mark into “true” macro territory.
Georgia State Patrol used its system of Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) surveillance cameras to issue a ticket to a motorcyclist who was allegedly looking at his cell phone while riding, according to a copy of the citation obtained by 404 Media. The incident is notable because Flock cameras are not designed for traffic enforcement or minor code violations, and many jurisdictions explicitly tell constituents that the cameras will not be used for traffic enforcement.
The incident happened December 26 in Coffee County, Georgia. The ticket lists the offense as “Holding/supporting wireless telecommunications device,” and includes the note “CAPTURED ON FLOCK CAMERA 31 MM 1 HOLDING PHONE IN LEFT HAND.”
A spokesperson for the Georgia State Patrol told 404 Media that the ticket was issued because of a “unique circumstance” in which a Flock camera happened to capture a traffic infraction, and that Flock cameras are not usually used by the department for traffic enforcement.
“This incident was a rare and unique circumstance where the captured image from the camera exposed an additional violation beyond the vehicle’s expired registration,” the spokesperson said. “This situation does not reflect a standard enforcement endeavor by the Department of Public Safety.” The traffic citation obtained by 404 Media does not mention that the man’s registration was expired.
Still, the incident is notable because Flock cameras are often pitched to police as tools for solving serious crimes, finding stolen vehicles, and locating missing people. They distinctly are not traffic cameras and are not pitched as such; the use of a Flock camera in this way shows that the images they capture can sometimes be detailed enough to be used as the pretext for a traffic violation, anyway.
Many police departments go out of their way to tell community members that Flock cameras are not used for traffic enforcement. For example, the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, states in a FAQ that “GSPD [Glenwood Springs Police Department] does not use Flock cameras for traffic enforcement, parking enforcement, or minor code violations.” El Paso, Texas, tells residents “these are not traffic enforcement cameras. They do not issue tickets, do not monitor speed, and do not generate revenue. They are investigative tools used after crimes occur.” Lynwood, Washington tells residents “these cameras will not be used for traffic infractions, immigration enforcement, or monitoring First Amendment-protected expressive activity” (Flock cameras have now been used for all of these purposes, as we have reported.)
The fact that police in Georgia did use Flock cameras for traffic enforcement highlights yet again that, essentially, law enforcement agencies are able to use these cameras for whatever they want. There are very few limitations on what Flock cameras can be used for, and police do not get warrants to search Flock’s network of cameras, either locally or nationwide. Network audits, which are spreadsheets of Flock searches we have obtained via public records requests, have shown that police use Flock for all sorts of reasons; they often do not list any reason at all for searching a license plate.
The man who was cited in Georgia posted about the incident in an anti-Flock Facebook group asking for advice. He said that he showed up in court and the ticket was dropped. The man did not respond to multiple requests for comment from 404 Media and because he is a private citizen cited for a minor traffic violation, we are not naming him. 404 Media independently obtained the citation.
I'm a bit late to the party, but I was just linked Anthony Moser's poetic and impassioned evisceration of LLMs today and I think anyone who hasn't yet read it should do so. I cosign it as an articulation not just of my position on the subject, but of my emotional stance towards it as well. The techno-cultural nexus that we have recently taken to calling "artificial intelligence" is deeply corrosive, and we must not tolerate it. We must not give it air to breathe. When this all falls to an ignominious end, we must dance on its grave that it may never rise again.
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