How rapidly is data usage actually growing?

Not 1000000x per year

Have you ever looked for data about the growth in data? As odd as it sounds, it’s hard to find. One can see posters about the growth in data consumption like the number of Wikipedia pages each year and websites and all. A Google Images search pulls up slides, without sources, that look like motivational posters on the walls of bad college sports teams, about all of the data being created in the world. Many list figures like 10x, 50x, 1000x, 1000000x growth per year or figures that don’t make much sense.

I finally found one source that I like: Ericsson’s annual reports on the state of mobile data by region, expressed in exabytes by month (a million gigabytes). With some second-grade math, we can figure out the mobile data traffic in Gigabytes per capita by region. This is as good a proxy for data usage that I can find, although I am open to other suggestions. In most places, mobile data traffic grew by 20-70% in 2022 and a little less than 70% per year on average annually back to 2015.    

I am a little surprised to see that the growth rate is actually a normal-sounding figure and not 10,000x or something otherworldly. The pace doesn’t seem to be slowing down very much.   

Data below, Y axis on log scale. Source: Ericsson.

This document is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities or investment advisory services. I am the Portfolio Manager of Barca Capital, LLC, but the views I express are my own not necessarily those of my firm.