In One Timeline

The Price of a Gigabyte, To Scale

In 1980 one gigabyte of storage cost about $580,000. By 2023 it was a few cents - one of the steepest, longest price collapses in the history of technology, ~7.7 orders of magnitude. Then, for the first time in decades, it reversed: AI data-center demand pulled fab capacity away from consumer storage and prices ticked back up.

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No third-party image credits. This episode's visuals are original charts/animations and AI-generated b-roll — nothing that requires attribution.

Data sources & references

01John C. McCallum — disk drive & memory price dataset
02Our World in Data — historical cost of computer memory & storage (CC BY)
03Backblaze — cost per gigabyte of hard drives over time
04TrendForce — NAND flash price data (2024–26)