According to a report released by 404MEDIA, the Internet Archive and Wikipedia, the world's top public welfare websites, are currently being destroyed by AI. The problem now is not that AI crawlers are frantically crawling content (although they are still crawling frantically), but that the artificial intelligence industry requires massive hard drives to store data, which has led to continued increases in hard drive prices and difficulty in purchasing suitable products.
Both the Internet Archive and Wikipedia require massive hard drives to store data. For example, the Internet Archive collects more than 100TB of new data every day, and has currently stored up to 210PB of data. Therefore, the Internet Archive needs to continuously add and replace large-capacity mechanical hard drives.
The Wikimedia Foundation operates multiple projects such as Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Storage costs have also become a big problem for the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia alone stores more than 65 million articles. Server and storage capacity are crucial to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Rely on community donations and seek help from hard drive manufacturers:
The Internet Archive is currently seeking assistance from many parties. For example, members of the Internet Archive community are donating hard drives to the website for free. The Internet Archive is also actively seeking help from hard drive manufacturers to tide over the difficulties. However, it may be difficult to obtain free hard drive sponsorship directly. Perhaps the Internet Archive hopes to reach a reasonably priced purchase agreement with the hard drive manufacturers.
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahler said that the Internet Archive has found some ways to deal with the shortage of storage capacity, but the shortage of storage capacity has become a very real problem, and this problem is continuing to cost the Internet Archive time and money.
The Wikimedia Foundation stated that storage costs are also a problem faced by the foundation. Since the end of 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation has been concerned about the continued rise in hard drive prices. The price increase affects the purchase of memory and hard drives, and also affects the Wikimedia Foundation's server delivery cycle and the ability to place future orders.
Regarding the current situation, the Wikimedia Foundation said that as a non-profit organization, the foundation is very cautious about budget allocation. The foundation is currently adopting workarounds as much as possible, including rationally arranging the priorities of hardware investment to increase flexibility, and extending the service life of existing hardware as much as possible.
Both mechanical hard drives and solid-state drives face procurement difficulties:
For example, the Internet Archive and the Wikimedia Foundation may focus more on purchasing large-capacity mechanical hard drives. However, both mechanical hard drives and solid-state drives are now facing procurement difficulties, because artificial intelligence data centers also require massive hard drives to store data. AI companies tend to use faster solid-state drives, but mechanical hard drives are also purchased in large quantities to store less active data.
Storage systems maker Western Digital said it has largely sold out of its 2026 inventory for enterprise customers, most of which operate data centers. Previously, Micron's Intelligent Technology completely withdrew from the consumer market and no longer provided memory and solid-state drive products to consumers. This was because the growth of artificial intelligence-driven data centers led to a surge in memory and storage demand.
Of course, the problems faced by the Internet Archive and the Wikimedia Foundation are also plaguing ordinary users. The price of large-capacity mechanical hard drives is now too high, and the cost of assembling a NAS to store data has increased significantly. Unless the artificial intelligence craze subsides, it will be difficult for the prices of key products such as computers and servers to fall back.