Exabytes

An exabyte (EB) is a unit of digital information storage equal to 10^18 bytes in decimal SI usage. It sits in the SI prefix sequence that includes kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, peta-, exa-, zetta-, and yotta-. In practical terms, an exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, 1,000,000 gigabytes, or about 1.15 million terabytes. For binary data quantities, the corresponding unit is the exbibyte (EiB), which equals 2^60 bytes (approximately 1.15 × 10^18 bytes). The term exabyte is usually used for the decimal value.

Exabytes are used to describe very large data volumes such as global internet traffic, the storage capacity of large cloud providers, scientific datasets, and media archives. Businesses and researchers quantify scale in exabytes when dealing with multi-petabyte to multi-exabyte workloads, distribution networks, and long-term archival repositories.

Standardization and terminology notes: the IEC prefixes provide exa- for 10^18 and exbi- for 2^60; to avoid ambiguity, many contexts reserve EB for decimal exabytes and EiB for binary exbibytes. Some older or vendor materials may use EB to refer to the binary value, which can lead to confusion.

Trends: data generation continues to grow rapidly due to high-definition video, cloud computing, and the expansion of connected devices. As data storage and processing needs scale, exabytes and higher units are increasingly referenced in planning, capacity measurements, and policy discussions about data localization and infrastructure.