HONG KONG -- If each gigabyte in a zettabyte were a brick, 1 zettabyte (ZB) would be enough to build 258 Great Walls of China -- each with nearly 3.9 billion bricks. That is how an analyst at U.S. networking company Cisco once described the staggering amount of digital data the world is accumulating.
China, with around 1 billion internet users and a vast surveillance network, is fast becoming the biggest part of that "datasphere." One projection by Seagate a few years ago estimated the nation's annual data generation would reach 48.6 ZB by 2025, or nearly 28% of the global total.
