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A zettabyte (ZB) is a unit of digital information storage equal to one sextillion (\(10^{21}\)) bytes, or a billion terabytes. It is a measure of extremely large amounts of data, typically used to quantify global internet traffic, big data, and the output of cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT). To illustrate the scale, a single zettabyte is equivalent to one trillion gigabytes, 1,000 exabytes, or the amount of data in about 12 billion 4K videos. 

A huge amount of data: One zettabyte is \(10^{21}\) bytes, which is 1 followed by 21 zeros.  A measure of scale: It's used to describe the vast amounts of data generated globally, such as annual internet traffic or data stored in data centers. 

How a zettabyte is used

Measuring global data: Organizations like Cisco have tracked global internet traffic in zettabytes, noting milestones like exceeding one zettabyte of traffic in a year.

Forecasting growth: Analytics firms forecast that the world's data creation will continue to grow and be measured in the tens or hundreds of zettabytes in the coming years.

Describing big data: The term is used to convey the massive scale of data that modern AI and machine learning systems work with.