Economists and analysts often throw around insanely large numbers... "Trillion" gets tossed out in conversation, especially when talking about things like government debt and spending. We know what it looks like written out - a one with 12 zeros behind it - but we can't truly grasp its sheer size. There is one industry, though, where it's a common unit. In fact, in this sector, 1 trillion is considered small - or even substandard. What isn't small is the opportunity here for investors. Let me show you. Two Times Larger Than the Sun I bought my first terabyte hard drive more than a decade ago. A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes - or roughly 1 trillion bytes of data. At the time, it seemed like a massive amount of storage capacity. And I considered it well worth the couple hundred bucks I spent on it. Today, it's normal for USB flash drives to be 1 terabyte. And you can buy 18-terabyte hard drives. Why the sudden need for more space? Well, every second of every day, we're producing an exponential amount of data. In fact, in 2020, every person on the planet created an average of 1.74 megabytes of data every second. That's approximately 2.5 exabytes of data each day! For reference, an exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes of data, or 1 million terabytes. My favorite way to comprehend this amount of data is to imagine that if 1 gigabyte were equal to the size of the Earth, 1 exabyte would be the sun. That would mean we're creating 2 1/2 suns each day. But data is on an exponential incline. Humans are projected to create 463 exabytes of data on a daily basis by 2025. That's a more than 18,400% increase in a mere five years. Now, plenty of this data will be mundane things, like emails and social media. But the reality is we've also digitized entire economies and stock exchanges. Not to mention, there's the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles and virtual reality. And all of this will be fed by another of the fastest-growing sectors over the next decade. | 
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