Check out this cool video from AMD about how cloud computing is managing the information explosion.

1.8 billion Internet users worldwide. 10 billion Google searches a month. What does it all mean for the cloud? It changes the demands of information technology. 

Below you’ll find attribution for those stats, as these are not AMD’s claims.

• There are an estimated 1.8 billion Internet users worldwide…  close to 400% increase since 2000 (source)
• Over 10 billion Google searches in the United States… in March 2010 alone (source)
  • A typical Google search consumes about .3 watt-hours of energy (source)
  • An estimated 3 billion watt-hours are consumed in the US per month on Google searches. You could power a 60 watt light bulb for more than 5,000 years on that energy alone (math: 60 watt light bulb consumes 60 watts per hour. 3 billion/60 = 50 million hours. 50 million hours/24 hours in a day = 2.08 million days. 2.08 million days/365 days in a year = 5,707 years)
• More than 20 hours of  YouTube videos are uploaded… every minute (source)
• Over 200 billion emails are sent… every day (source)
• More than 340,000 books have been published in 2010… but over 400,000 blogs were posted on May 4 alone (source)
• In 2005, mankind created 150 exabytes of data… this year it is estimated we will create 1,200 exabytes (source)
• One exabyte can hold the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress… 100,000 times over (source; math: 10 terabytes could hold the entire printed collection.  1 exabyte = 1 million terabytes)
• In 2020 we expect to create 35 Zettabytes of data, or 35,000 exabytes. A Zettabyte is 1 TRILLION gigabytes (source)
• Microsoft and Amazon are estimated to operate over 50,000 servers (source)
• Google operates over 1 million servers, approximately 2% of the world’s servers (source)
• A typical data center facility spends almost half of its energy consumption on the systems powering and cooling the computers inside, and not on the computers themselves (source)
• By 2012, customers are expected to spend $42 billion on cloud computing (source)
• “By 2020, a significant portion of the Digital Universe will be centrally hosted, managed, or stored in public or private repositories that today we call ‘cloud services.’ And even if a byte in the Digital Universe does not ‘live in the cloud’ permanently, it will, all likelihood, pass through the cloud at some point in its life.” – IDC (source)
• Facebook operates over 30,000 servers (source)