By Charly SHELTON

As summer arrives and families begin planning road trips, vacations and Fourth of July celebrations, many will be doing something almost automatically: taking pictures. Lots of pictures.

Whether it’s a giant-resolution GoPro video of a summer whitewater rafting trip or a professional camera shot of the family in matching red-white-and-blue outfits for America’s 250th anniversary or even a blurry photo of that sandwich you needed to snap, more photos are being created than ever before. Most people don’t think much about where those photos go after they’re posted to social media. It is assumed memory cards, external hard drives and cloud storage will always be available when they’re needed.

That assumption may soon be proven wrong.

One of the less-discussed consequences of the artificial intelligence boom is its growing appetite for data storage. While most conversations about AI focus on chatbots, water consumption (according to the internet, water is used primarily for cooling the massive server farms that power complex language models and for generating the electricity those systems consume) and the possibility of robots taking over jobs, the reality is that AI requires an enormous amount of physical infrastructure to function. Every AI model is trained on massive datasets. Every user interaction is stored for analysis. Every generated image, document, video and conversation creates even more information that must be housed somewhere. And all of that data needs a home.

In recent months, several storage manufacturers and industry analysts have warned that demand for data storage is accelerating rapidly. In March, Western Digital announced that all of its hard drives for 2026 have already been sold, with demand for storage solution business driven largely toward cloud providers and AI-related infrastructure. 

“We have firm purchase orders with our top seven customers through calendar year 2026. We also have in place robust commercial agreements with three of our top five customers: two through calendar year 2027 and one through calendar year 2028,” said Irving Tan, chief executive officer, Western Digital. “We’re pretty much sold out for calendar year 2026.” 

“Our near line capacity is fully allocated through calendar year 2026,” said Seagate CEO William Mosley. Seagate designs and manufactures hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs) and data storage systems.

Industry experts estimate that AI systems will require hundreds of exabytes of additional storage in the coming years. (For perspective, one exabyte equals one billion gigabytes.)

Most consumers, understandably, don’t spend much time thinking about exabytes. But what is noticed is when products become hard to find or more expensive to replace.

Technology publications have reported shortages of certain high-capacity hard drives at the consumer level as business customers purchase storage in large quantities. Photography publications have also begun warning photographers to expect continued upward pressure on consumable media prices as manufacturers prioritize larger commercial customers.

And for hobbyist and pro-sumer level photographers, videographers and content creators, this price shift is already becoming impactful.

A decade ago, a family vacation might generate a few hundred photographs. Today, many travelers return home with thousands of images, hours of video footage and perhaps even aerial drone photography. The size of a high-quality raw photo on a modern DSLR camera can be upwards of 100 MB, which is more than the 20 MB of 10 years ago. Video resolutions continue climbing from 1080p to 4K and now 8K. Storage requirements that once seemed excessive have become inadequate.

“So, like a fox that’s broken into a turkey pen, it seems like AI is set to snatch and grab as much hard drive capacity as possible,” wrote Alan Palazon in Digital Camera World. “Perhaps you and I should get our hands on some extra storage before our next big shoots.” 

As someone who has spent the last two-and-a-half decades behind a camera, this reporter has watched storage evolve from a minor expense to a significant part of the photography budget. Hard drives that once seemed impossibly large eventually fill too quickly. The amount of data we create continues to grow with each new camera or cellphone release, and now the demand generated by AI is intensifying the pressure on the systems that store it.

The irony is that most people interacting with AI may never realize they are also participating in this demand. With every generated image, every AI-assisted document and every chatbot conversation, they contribute to a growing mountain of digital information. Individually, the impact is tiny. Collectively, it is enormous.

Fortunately, this is not a crisis. Yet.

There is no indication that consumers will suddenly be unable to purchase hard drives, memory cards or cloud storage subscriptions. The shelves are not about to go empty. What experts are predicting is something far less dramatic but potentially more frustrating: higher prices, tighter supply and longer replacement cycles as manufacturers focus on serving the rapidly growing needs of data centers and cloud providers.

So for those planning a major summer trip, now is a good time to get that new SD card you’ve been meaning to buy. It’s not that you won’t be able to get it later, but the prices are only going up and the delay to get it out of the shipper and into your camera may be longer than you expect. You don’t want to see “Card Full” as your son walks up to Mickey at Walt Disney World and photos need to be deleted on the spot because an SD card was $100 more expensive than you thought and it didn’t arrive on time.

The downside of the artificial intelligence revolution is often discussed in terms of what it might do in the future. But some of its effects are already here. They aren’t arriving in the form of humanoid robots or self-aware computers, but they’re showing up in server racks, data centers and the storage devices we rely on every day.