Real Girls: How much does the internet weigh?


	September 26, 2024

Original photo by Daniel Villalobos Oliver/ iStock

The entire internet has the weight of several strawberries.

The internet is unfathomably vast, but it's also quite small. In fact, a researcher in 2006 found that in physical terms, it only weighed about 50 grams — roughly the same as three large strawberries. That estimate was updated to 141 grams in 2018, and as the internet continues to grow exponentially, we can assume it's well on its way to the equivalent of a whole crate of strawberries. What's actually being weighed in that calculation are the electrons inside the computer servers that make the internet run. The weight of that energy is considerably heavier than that of the actual stored data on the internet itself, which in 2007 was measured as low as 0.2 millionths of an ounce — about the same as the smallest grain of sand you can imagine. There are at least 100 million internet servers in existence, which weigh quite a lot when combined.

These are all estimations, of course. The internet is growing at a rapid pace, and any calculations of its size — whether in terms of the information contained therein or the actual mass of the infrastructure — could quickly become outdated. Even so, the disparity between how simultaneously big and tiny the web can seem by different measurements remains striking.

Strawberries are berries.

FACT

FIB

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The internet doubles in size every __ years.

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		Numbers Don't Lie

Tons of strawberries produced in the U.S. in 2023

1.4 million

Estimated gigawatts of electricity it takes to power the internet each year

84-143

Pounds of strawberries eaten per capita by Americans in 2021

Internet users in the world

5.45 billion

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Each seed of a strawberry is its own fruit.

Despite the "false fruit" designation they've received from some botanists, strawberries are actually what's called accessory fruits. This means the fleshy, bright-red pulp is derived from the plant's receptacle (the thickened part of the plant's stalk that connects to the flower), and the individual seeds are the actual fruit. As the average strawberry has about 200 seeds, that's a lot of fruit per strawberry. The garden strawberry (as the common strawberry is known) is actually a hybrid of two different species, Fragaria virginiana (from North America) and Fragaria chiloensis (from Chile), and was first bred in Brittany, France, in the 1750s.