AI Wave Causes Skyrocketing Maintenance Costs for Internet Archive and Wikipedia: Hardware Price Hikes + Crawler Traffic Consumption

The rapid development of AI technology is putting pressure on internet public welfare platforms. According to foreign media reports, maintenance costs for the Internet Archive and Wikipedia have surged due to the AI wave, mainly from soaring storage hardware prices and traffic consumption by AI crawlers.

The Internet Archive holds 210PB of archival data, adding 100TB daily, but the required 28-30TB hard drives are either out of stock or overpriced; Wikipedia has over 65 million articles, with tight memory and hard drive supplies. Both are currently dealing with cost pressures through donations or resource optimization.