The Weight of the Internet Will Shock You

Depending on who you ask, the internet weighs no more than a potato, a strawberry—or something much, much smaller. WIRED investigates.
ANIMATION: ANJALI NAIR; GETTY IMAGES

The internet is massive. But does it have … actual mass? Big server farms and miles of fiber-optic cables do, of course, but we don’t mean the infrastructure of the internet. We mean the internet itself. The information. The data. The cybernetics. And because storing and moving stuff through cyberspace requires energy—which, per Einstein, has mass—it should, in theory, be possible to calculate the internet’s weight.

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