Hard drive prices have spiked sharply as AI data centers and generative model training farms vacuum up storage capacity, leaving Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, and Wikimedia scrambling to preserve the web on a shrunken budget. Storage inflation is compounded by cloud providers tightening scrape-prevention policies, blocking legitimate archival bots.
This is a supply crunch with a twist: not just scarcity, but demand concentration. AI training pipelines need petabytes of cold storage for synthetic data, training corpora, and checkpoints—pulling capacity from long-tail use cases like non-profit preservation and research.