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Study Claiming 90% of Data Centers Store Family Photos Fact-Checked

“Study Reveals 90% Of Data Centers Just Storing Your Wife’s Pictures Of The Kids Family · May 19, 2026 · BabylonBee.com Image for article: Study Reveals 90% Of Data Centers Just Storing Your Wife’s Pictures Of The Kids Banner Ad OVERLAND PARK, KS — The need for the construction of massive data storage centers has been in the news again recently, with the results of a new study indicating that 90% of data centers are just storage for your wife's pictures of the kids. Though many people mistakenly assumed that the massive facilities being built throughout the country were processing complex data, the study confirmed that the data centers were actually pulling huge amounts of electricity just to preserve 47 nearly identical photos of your toddler eating a piece of cantaloupe in July 2021. "People worry about the environmental impact of these facilities," lead researcher, Dr. Doug Miller, said. "But we now know that the primary consumption of data is just your wife refusing to delete even the blurriest photo of your oldest sleeping in a car seat from four years ago." According to the report, a single folder on your wife's phone labeled "Park Day 2023" currently utilizes more storage capacity than the entire digital archives of the Library of Congress. The folder contains 12,000 photos, of which 11,994 feature a child with their eyes completely closed. At publishing time, the research team had confirmed that Google would now have to construct a new nuclear power plant by the end of the summer to accommodate your wife's upcoming footage of your child's pre-K graduation.”
False claim
Confidence: High Checked on May 27, 2026

Summary

No credible research indicates that 90 % of data centers are used solely to store personal family photos. Data centers actually host a broad range of business, scientific, and consumer data, including communications, financial records, and media. The article making the claim originates from a known satirical outlet, not from a legitimate study.

Recheck this fact Runs a fresh check with up-to-date sources

Sources 60 searched

brookings.edu
  • The future of data centers | Brookings

    Guided by large language models (LLMs) and machine learning, data centers can parse through these materials and act autonomously upon the derived insights. The applications that are hosted at these facilities can summarize text, edit photos or videos, examine data, code software, and perform many administrative and financial tasks in real time.

netchoice.org
  • Data Centers 101: What is a Data Center, and Why Do We Need Them? - NetChoice

    Think about all of the things you access through your phone and computer. Your family photos, notes, emails, digital documents, scribbles and screenshots don’t actually reside in the clouds; they’re stored and connected to you in data centers, which function as the brick-and-mortar of the digital world.

pewresearch.org
cardinalnews.org
  • ‘You could never count’ the amount of digital information stored in data centers - Cardinal News

    Business data — customer records, financial records, communication records — fills data centers, Nikolopoulos said. They also store media, including video, audio, photos and other social media content, much of it user-generated. Big data repositories exist for specific applications, such as information that a business would collect and analyze to determine its customer base or its most profitable products — data analytics to improve services and profits. Many websites sitting among those petabytes hold potentially personal and sensitive data, including health care information, medical images, genomic data, biological data and clinical data, Nikolopoulos said.

en.wikipedia.org
  • Data center - Wikipedia

    A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. Data centers are critical infrastructure for the storage and processing of information, and they support the global financial system, cloud services, machine ...

insideclimatenews.org
connectbit.com
  • Cloud Storage Statistics You Need to Know: Key Trends

    Google Drive has over 1 billion users, while Dropbox has over 700 million reported users. 48% of businesses store their confidential and important data on cloud technologies. 65.28% of people use personal cloud storage as their primary data storage.

babylonbee.com
archive.ph

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