Big data has become a major part of the technology economy, and it keeps growing as fast as the world creates data. These statistics show how big the market is and how much data the world now produces. They also show why the bigger questions in 2026 are where that data lives, what it costs to run, and whether companies turn it into value. Every number is dated and linked to its original or listed source, and we refresh the page each quarter.
Top Big Data Statistics for 2026
These are the headline numbers that define big data in 2026:
- The global big data and analytics market is worth $394.7 billion in 2025, on track for $1.18 trillion by 2034. (Fortune Business Insights, Jun 2026)
- The world creates roughly 181 zettabytes of data per year as of 2025. (Statista / IDC Global DataSphere)
- Worldwide public cloud end-user spending reached $723.4 billion in 2025. (Gartner, Nov 2024)
- 64% of organizations now run relational databases as a cloud service. (Flexera, Mar 2026)
- 29% of cloud spend is wasted, the first increase in five years. (Flexera, Mar 2026)
- An estimated $122 billion of cloud infrastructure spend is wasted in a year (Red9 analysis of Gartner and Flexera data).
- 73.8% of the world's population, about 6.12 billion people, is online. (DataReportal, Apr 2026)
Big Data Market Size and Growth
Start with the scale. Big data has grown from a niche analytics category into one of the larger segments of enterprise technology, now measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.
The global big data and analytics market is valued at $394.7 billion in 2025. (Fortune Business Insights)
The market has grown steadily, from $169 billion in 2018 to an estimated $394.7 billion in 2025, more than doubling in seven years. Cloud adoption, machine learning, and the flood of connected-device data are the main engines behind the climb.
The market is projected to reach $1.18 trillion by 2034. (Fortune Business Insights)
That implies a compound annual growth rate of about 12.8% through 2034. In effect the market is on track to roughly triple again from its 2025 level, making big data one of the faster-growing segments of enterprise IT.
The Big Data Market Is on Track to Nearly Triple by 2034
01Global big data & analytics market value, USD
There are 5,427 data centers in the United States. (Cloudscene)
The US has by far the most data centers of any country, the physical backbone that stores and moves the world's data. That concentration is also why US power and water supplies are now part of the AI-infrastructure conversation.
The colocation data center market is worth $104.2 billion in 2025. (MarketsandMarkets)
Third-party "colo" facilities let companies rent data-center space rather than build their own. For most organizations, renting capacity is now faster and cheaper than constructing a facility, which keeps the segment expanding.
The colocation data center market is forecast to nearly double to $204.4 billion by 2030. (MarketsandMarkets)
Demand for third-party data-center space keeps rising as companies avoid the capital cost of building their own. AI training and inference are accelerating the trend, pushing operators to add capacity faster than in any recent year.
A market this size rests on a simple driver: the world keeps producing more data every year.
Data Volume and How It Gets Created
More users, more devices, and more AI workloads keep adding to the volume companies have to store and secure. This is the raw material the whole market runs on.
The world created about 147 zettabytes of data in 2024, rising to an estimated 181 zettabytes in 2025. (Statista)
Annual data creation has more than doubled in a few years and keeps climbing as more of life moves online. Storing, securing, and governing that data without letting costs climb is the harder problem for most organizations, since the world keeps only a fraction of what it produces.
The world created, captured, copied and consumed roughly 402.74 million terabytes of data per day in 2024. (Statista)
Across a full year that daily rate works out to about 147 zettabytes, the 2024 total; the 2025 estimate is higher still at around 181 zettabytes. Most of that data is never stored, but the share organizations do keep is growing faster than budgets, which is why storage and compute cost control has become a board-level concern.
The World's Data Nearly Tripled in Five Years
02Data created worldwide per year, zettabytes
73.8% of the world's population is online. (DataReportal)
About 6.12 billion people use the internet as of April 2026, and every one of them generates data through the platforms and services they use. Each new user adds to the raw material the big-data economy runs on.
The average internet user spends 6 hours and 38 minutes online each day. (DataReportal)
More devices, apps, and connected services keep pushing the figure up over time. Much of that activity creates behavioral data that feeds recommendation engines, ad systems, and product analytics, which makes attention one of the most-tracked datasets in the world.
Google holds 90.39% of the global search market. (Statcounter Global Stats)
As of May 2026, Google still dominates search worldwide, and every query is a data point about intent and behavior. That scale creates a feedback loop: more queries produce more behavioral data, which improves models and ad targeting, and rivals have struggled to break it.
Google Still Owns 90% of Search
06Global search engine market share, May 2026
Bing is a distant second in global search at 5.03%. (Statcounter Global Stats)
Google's dominance leaves every other engine in single digits, with Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo splitting the remainder.
There are 21.1 billion connected IoT devices in 2025. (IoT Analytics)
Up from 18.5 billion in 2024, connected devices are a fast-growing source of machine-generated big data. Much of that data is created and processed at the edge, never touching a central data center, which is reshaping where storage and compute need to sit.
Connected IoT devices are forecast to reach 39 billion by 2030. (IoT Analytics)
Up from 21.1 billion in 2025, each device adds to the machine-generated share of the world's data. That growth is a big reason edge computing and time-series storage are expanding so quickly.
All of that data has to live somewhere, and for most organizations that somewhere is now the cloud.
Cloud, Databases and Infrastructure Costs
As data volumes climb, the center of gravity has shifted to the cloud. That brings flexibility, and a new problem: oversized databases, idle compute, and storage bills that grow faster than budgets. This is the part of the big data story closest to the work we do at Red9.
Worldwide public cloud spending reached $723.4 billion in 2025. (Gartner)
Up from $595.7 billion in 2024, public cloud spending continues to grow at roughly 20% a year as more workloads leave on-premises hardware.
Software-as-a-service is the largest public-cloud segment, at $299 billion in 2025. (Gartner)
Within Gartner's $723.4 billion total, SaaS outweighs both infrastructure and platform services. Many SaaS tools also create new data silos, which is why integration and warehousing keep growing right alongside cloud adoption.
AWS holds 29% of the cloud infrastructure market, ahead of Azure (20%) and Google Cloud (13%). (Synergy Research Group)
Together the big three hold about 62% of cloud infrastructure services (and 67% of the narrower public-cloud segment), in a market running near $107 billion per quarter as of Q3 2025.
Three Companies Own Nearly Two-Thirds of the Cloud
03Cloud infrastructure market share, Q3 2025
Cloud infrastructure services revenue hit $106.9 billion in the third quarter of 2025. (Synergy Research Group)
That is roughly $390 billion over the trailing twelve months, up about 30% year over year, as AI workloads pull spending forward.
64% of organizations run relational databases as a cloud service. (Flexera)
Managed relational database services are now mainstream, and 71% of organizations also run a cloud data warehouse, evidence that core data workloads have moved to the cloud.
Databases Have Moved to the Cloud
04Organizations running relational databases as a managed cloud service
71% of organizations run a cloud data warehouse. (Flexera)
Cloud data warehouses are now standard infrastructure for analytics, sitting alongside the 64% that run relational databases as a service. Together they show that the heart of the data stack now lives in the cloud, from transactional databases through to analytics warehouses.
73% of organizations now run a hybrid cloud. (Flexera)
Multicloud and hybrid setups are the norm rather than the exception, which raises the complexity of keeping data consistent and secure across environments. For database teams it means more places for data to live, and more places for cost and risk to hide.
Organizations now use an average of 2.4 public cloud providers. (Flexera)
Most organizations spread workloads across more than one public cloud, and each provider adds another place for data, cost, and risk to live. Keeping databases consistent and governed across all of them is a growing part of the job for data teams.
The hybrid cloud market is worth $168.9 billion in 2025. (Mordor Intelligence)
Hybrid cloud pairs the scalability of public cloud with the control of private infrastructure, and the market is forecast to reach $347.8 billion by 2031.
The edge computing market is worth $33.4 billion in 2025. (Grand View Research)
Processing data closer to where it is created helps with latency and bandwidth, and the market is forecast to reach $328.0 billion by 2033, a 32.1% compound annual growth rate from 2026.
Organizations waste 29% of their cloud spend. (Flexera)
For the first time in five years the share of wasted cloud spend rose rather than fell, with respondents pointing to AI workloads as a major driver. Common drivers include over-provisioned databases and idle compute, plus unattached or over-tiered storage, oversized backup retention, and always-on dev and test environments.
About $122 Billion of Cloud Spend Is Wasted a Year
0529% of cloud infrastructure (IaaS + PaaS) spend
That 29% works out to roughly $122 billion of potentially avoidable IaaS and PaaS spend in a year. (Gartner) (Flexera)
Gartner puts worldwide IaaS and PaaS spending at about $420.5 billion in 2025; applying Flexera's 29% waste rate gives roughly $122 billion, much of it in over-sized database instances and idle compute. Right-sizing database instances, storage, backups, and idle environments is one of the most direct ways to recover part of that spend, which is the work we do when we size cloud databases to avoid overspending.
76% of large enterprises spend more than $5 million a month on public cloud. (Flexera)
Cloud has become a board-level cost line for most big organizations. At that scale even a few points of waste translate into millions a year, which is why FinOps has become its own discipline.
Much of that rising spend now traces back to one driver in particular: artificial intelligence.
AI, Business Value and Adoption
AI has made the data conversation more urgent, but higher spending does not guarantee better results. Many companies are investing heavily while still struggling to show measurable value, and the people who can close that gap are in short supply.
Worldwide AI infrastructure spending hit $318 billion in 2025, more than double the $153 billion spent in 2024. (IDC)
AI has become one of the clearest drivers of new data-infrastructure investment, which is why big data and AI budgets increasingly overlap. The jump from $153 billion in 2024 to $318 billion in 2025 is the steepest one-year rise IDC has recorded in the category.
Worldwide AI infrastructure spending is on track to exceed $1 trillion by 2029. (IDC)
The same forecast that pegs 2025 AI-infrastructure spend at $318 billion sees it more than tripling again by the end of the decade. If it holds, AI infrastructure alone would rival the entire big-data-and-analytics market.
Spending on AI-optimized infrastructure-as-a-service is set to roughly double to $37.5 billion in 2026. (Gartner)
Up from $18.3 billion in 2025, this is the fastest-growing slice of cloud infrastructure. Demand for GPUs and accelerators to train and run models is outpacing every other category of cloud spend.
Nearly every organization now uses generative AI in the cloud: 81% use it extensively or sparingly, and 45% use it extensively. (Flexera)
Generative AI is now among the most-used cloud services, and it is a major reason cloud data volumes (and bills) are climbing. For how this changes the work of database teams, see why AI won't replace your senior DBAs.
Only 46.4% of organizations report significant business value from their data and AI investments. (Wavestone)
A survey of 125 large enterprises found that fewer than half see high or significant value from their data and AI investments. It is a reminder that collecting data and profiting from it are different problems, and most of that gap is organizational rather than technical.
92% of executives say the main barrier to becoming data-driven is people, rather than technology. (Wavestone)
In the same survey, just 8% blamed technology; the rest pointed to culture, process, and organizational change as the real obstacles. It is why buying more tools rarely fixes a stalled data program.
The median US data scientist earns $112,590 per year. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
The role is among the better-paid in technology, and the salary reflects steady demand for people who can turn raw data into useful decisions.
Demand for data scientists is projected to grow 34% between 2024 and 2034. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
That works out to roughly 23,400 openings a year, far faster than the average US occupation. That talent gap is one reason many companies rely on outside specialists for database, analytics, and infrastructure work, a shift we cover in our outsourcing statistics.
The more data companies collect, the more pressure they face to govern it well.
Privacy, Governance and Data Control
Collecting data is only half the job. Privacy expectations, unstructured formats, and data-residency rules all shape how that data can be stored and used.
Around 80% of the world's data is unstructured. (IDC / Seagate)
Text, images, video, email, and social posts do not fit neatly into traditional databases, which is exactly why big data tools exist. This widely used figure traces to a 2018 IDC forecast and is best read as an order-of-magnitude estimate rather than a fresh measurement.
73% of US adults feel they have little or no control over the data companies collect about them. (Pew Research Center)
Data breaches and pervasive tracking have left most Americans wary of how their personal information is used. That distrust is now shaping regulation, from state privacy laws to tighter rules on storing and sharing customer data.
Worldwide sovereign-cloud infrastructure spending is forecast to reach $80 billion in 2026. (Gartner)
That is a 35.6% jump from 2025, driven by data-residency rules and regulated workloads. Governments and regulated industries increasingly require data to stay within national borders, and the big providers are racing to offer compliant regions.
Big Data Use Cases by Industry
These are the sectors where big data already pays its way.
The healthcare big data analytics market is worth about $52.1 billion in 2025 and is forecast to surpass $130 billion by 2034. (IMARC Group)
Healthcare is one of the fastest-growing markets for analytics as providers lean on data for diagnostics, operations, and cost control. On its current trajectory the market more than doubles from its 2025 level by 2034, driven by AI-assisted diagnostics, population-health analytics, and the push to wring efficiency out of stretched health systems.
Big data in supply chain management is worth about $8.8 billion in 2025. (Market Research Future)
After the pandemic-era disruptions, supply chain operators adopted analytics to manage inventory and respond to demand swings; the market is forecast to keep growing into the 2030s.
Netflix has estimated its recommendation system is worth about $1 billion a year. (Inside Big Data)
This widely cited figure comes from 2018 and remains the classic example of big data's commercial value: Netflix has said its recommendation engine influences roughly 80% of what people watch, improving retention.
Key Takeaways
- The big data market is still compounding: valued around $394.7 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $1.18 trillion by 2034.
- The world now creates more data than companies can realistically store, govern, and use, which makes how they store and govern data as important as how much they collect.
- Cloud is the default home for core data workloads: 64% of organizations run relational databases as a managed cloud service and 71% run a cloud data warehouse.
- Cost control has become one of the biggest big data problems. Applying Flexera's 29% cloud-waste rate to Gartner's IaaS and PaaS spending points to roughly $122 billion in avoidable spend a year.
- AI is accelerating infrastructure demand, but many organizations still struggle to turn data and AI spending into measurable value.
- For database teams the practical challenge is steady: keep data available, secure, and performant while holding down cloud, storage, and compute costs.
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References
25 sources — every stat above links here
- 1. Fortune Business Insights — Big Data Analytics Market Report (Jun 2026) fortunebusinessinsights.com ↗
- 2. Statista — Volume of Data Created, Captured, Copied and Consumed Worldwide statista.com ↗
- 3. Gartner — Forecast: Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Total $723 Billion in 2025 (Nov 2024) gartner.com ↗
- 4. Flexera — 2026 State of the Cloud Report flexera.com ↗
- 5. Flexera — 2026 State of the Cloud Report: Cloud Value Is Rising While AI Waste Grows (press release, Mar 2026) flexera.com ↗
- 6. DataReportal — Digital 2026 Mid-Year Global Update Report (We Are Social / Meltwater) datareportal.com ↗
- 7. IDC — Worldwide AI Infrastructure Spending (press release, Apr 2026) idc.com ↗
- 8. Wavestone — 2025 AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey dataiq.global ↗
- 9. Cloudscene — United States Data Center Market Overview cloudscene.com ↗
- 10. MarketsandMarkets — Data Center Colocation Market (press release, Jun 2025) marketsandmarkets.com ↗
- 11. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Outlook Handbook: Data Scientists bls.gov ↗
- 12. MarketsandMarkets — Data Center Colocation Market Report, 2025-2030 marketsandmarkets.com ↗
- 13. IMARC Group — Healthcare Big Data Analytics Market Report imarcgroup.com ↗
- 14. Market Research Future — Supply Chain Big Data Analytics Market Report marketresearchfuture.com ↗
- 15. Inside Big Data — Netflix Recommendations Save $1 Billion Per Year (2018) insidebigdata.com ↗
- 16. DataReportal — Digital 2025 Global Overview Report (We Are Social / Meltwater) datareportal.com ↗
- 17. Statcounter Global Stats — Search Engine Market Share Worldwide (May 2026) gs.statcounter.com ↗
- 18. IDC / Seagate — The Digitization of the World: Data Age 2025 (white paper, 2018) seagate.com ↗
- 19. Pew Research Center — How Americans View Data Privacy (Oct 2023) pewresearch.org ↗
- 20. Synergy Research Group — Cloud Market Growth Rate Rises Again in Q3 2025 srgresearch.com ↗
- 21. Mordor Intelligence — Hybrid Cloud Market Report (2026-2031) mordorintelligence.com ↗
- 22. Grand View Research — Edge Computing Market Size & Share Report (2026-2033) grandviewresearch.com ↗
- 23. IoT Analytics — State of IoT 2025: Number of Connected IoT Devices iot-analytics.com ↗
- 24. Gartner — Worldwide Sovereign Cloud IaaS Spending to Total $80 Billion in 2026 (press release, Feb 2026) gartner.com ↗
- 25. Gartner — AI-Optimized IaaS Is Poised to Become the Next Growth Engine (press release, Oct 2025) gartner.com ↗
