this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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The biggest standard rack I could find has the dimensions of 19 inches wide, 90 inches tall, 47.2 inches deep. Height isn't super important for floor usage, so a rack takes up 896.8 square inches or ~~74.73~~ 6.2 square feet. A 4U server chassis holds roughly 10 drives, and can fit 12 chasses in a 48U rack.
This datacenter can hold a maximum of ~~8,580,264~~ 130,398,967 racks holding ~~1,029,631,680~~ 15,647,876,040 drives. Assuming 4TiB drives, that's a total of ~~3.84~~ 68.82 Zebibytes of data. The entirety of the Internet has roughly 148.23 Zebibytes.
This new, smaller datacenter will hold approximately ~~2.56%~~ 46.43% of all the data in the world.
Edited for accuracy
I dont want to be that guy but 896.8 square inches is actually 6.22 square feet
No you're totally right, I didn't do math correctly. It's way bigger
There are 4U server cases that hold 77 3.5” hard drives, and you could rig up empty cases with NAND of various forms and get even more density, if you could keep cooling under control.
Also, most datacenters will not use 4TB disks, you would use giant 20TB enterprise disks (for spinning rust) or 8TB enterprise SAS or nVME drives. You will lose some of that capacity to redundancy though, as RAID and region replication takes place.
So total capacity, minus disk first losses (so *0.85 as a rule of thumb) and then divide by the redundancy (probably / 3)
Realistically there's going to be a mixture of cpu compute, gpu compute, storage, and general purpose. I feel like 10 drives per chassis is a decent average, and I intentionally used 4TiB to illustrate this truly absurd proposal.