According to the International Telecommunication Union figures cited by the Progressive Policy Institute, the world cumulatively moved 7.94 zettabytes of data in 2025. For context, one zettabyte is a sextillion bytes. The same analysis states that the cumulative internet traffic will cross 10 sextillion bytes in 2027. The traffic mostly contains video, including movies (1 billion bytes), TikTok videos (8 million bytes), photographs (2 million bytes), voice calls (200,000 bytes), one-paragraph emails with hypertext (30,000 bytes), and one-paragraph emails with plain text (2,000 bytes). What part of this traffic is humane, and what is diabolically infested by AI bots?
A Warning By Cloudflare CEO
In March 2026, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a conversation with an SXSW audience that AI bots will generate more traffic than humans by 2027. Before generative AI, bots accounted for about 20 percent of web traffic, mostly as search crawlers. Now an AI agent shopping for a camera can hit 5,000 sites while a person checks five at most. Prince called it “real traffic and real load.” The guy is right about the load. He appears less convincing about the need for it. Only y'all luddites would know the real deal and the consequences.
What Does An AI Bot Do?
Prince, in his remark, further stated that the growth is gradual and shows no sign of slowing. Now that is the crux of the problem most wouldn't dare see. The network keeps expanding to feed systems that visit a thousand times more pages than any human would. Prince even talked about spinning up temporary “sandboxes” for these agents by the millions every second. So now an industry is ensuring infrastructure built for people is being re-engineered for software that never sleeps and never stops requesting data. More of the traffic, as we know, is automated; less of it is generated by actual users.
You can read the Progressive Policy Research insight [here](https://www.progressivepolicy.org/internet-traffic-to-reach-10-sextillion-bytes-next-year/) and the interview below.
**See Also:** [AI Bot Protests Wikipedia Ban With Viral Angry Blogs; Here’s What It Said](/tech/107840/ai-bot-protests-wikipedia-ban-with-viral-angry-blogs-heres-what-it-said)
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