The Wayback Machine faces another threat from AI ridiculously expensive hard drive prices

Date:
Fri, 08 May 2026 19:00:00 +0000

Description:
This is yet another example of the far-reaching nature of the AI-driven component crisis.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The Wayback Machine is under threat from AI once more The AI boom has tripled the price of the large hard disks needed for this expansive archive of the web This is a further danger posed to the Wayback Machine, which is also in trouble due to news sites blocking its web crawler, which is again due to AI It's an increasingly desperate time for those trying to keep a record of the history of the web,
as AI is again proving a serious stumbling block to the efforts made by the likes of the Internet Archive and this time it's about soaring hard drive prices.

You may recall that last month, we covered another angle on the difficulties AI has been causing the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. This is the non-profit organization's history of the web, and there's a problem in that, as part of measures designed to foil AI scraping their content, online news sites are increasingly blocking the web crawler the Internet Archive uses to compile the snapshots of web pages that comprise the archive. And now, 404 Media reports (via Tom's Hardware ) that the Internet Archive is suffering
due to the hard drive shortage brought on by AI (as more large drives are needed in data centers for AI workloads). Latest Videos From You may like AI could finish the Wayback Machine as news sites increasingly block it out The global memory shortage: The hidden bottleneck behind the AI boom 'Were pretty much sold out for calendar 2026': Western Digital CEO says storage firm is completely sold out of HDD capacity already, so does that mean more price rises to come?

Yes, the AI boom is not just about LLMs (Large Language Models) eating your RAM and SSDs, but also hard drives (as well as indirect effects on other components).

The huge hard disks on the order of 30TB that the Internet Archive needs to host the Wayback Machine's historical record are now up to three times more expensive, or indeed completely out of stock. In this way, the AI boom is now a "very real issue costing us time and money," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle commented to 404 Media.

With some 210 petabytes (210,000TB) of web page snapshots in its library, which is expanding by 100TB daily, you can appreciate the scope of the web archiving that's going on here.

Wikipedia's parent non-profit, the Wikimedia Foundation, is reportedly facing similar struggles, as you'd imagine. It has some 65 million articles to host, which takes up a lot of drive space. A Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told 404 Media that the main problems are the "purchase of memory and hard
drives", but also lead times on server deliveries. Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. (Image credit: Ollyy / Shutterstock) Analysis: workarounds aplenty but what about tape? So, is the Wayback Machine really in danger? Are we going to see the wheels start to
come off the 'living history of the internet'? Well, there's no immediate peril, as apparently donors and the community around the Wayback Machine are pulling together to work around the issue of spiralling drive costs.

Still, this is clearly a concern going forward and the blocking of the Internet Archive's web crawler is even more so. The problem there is that the news sites are blocking AI scraping, but those blocks can be circumvented if the owner of the AI targets the content via the Wayback Machine instead. It's a thorny issue, but talks are ongoing, and hopefully both sides can come to some kind of resolution.

And on the drive front, if you're wondering why the Internet Archive can't switch to tape as a storage medium , the catch there is that it's a 'living' archive of the web as in it's online, for people to access those web page snapshots on demand. As such, hard drives are needed for that access to be responsive. Tape simply isn't up to snuff performance-wise in this case.

The Internet Archive does use tape, mind, for longer-term backups of content, but it's only part of the puzzle in that respect. Hard drives are vital for the actual day-to-day functioning of the Wayback Machine as we know it, in terms of being able to quickly serve users the content they need online. The best laptops for all budgets Our top picks, based on real-world testing and comparisons

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/internet/the-wayback-machine-faces-another -threat-from-ai-ridiculously-expensive-hard-drive-prices


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