Cloud, Compute and Storage Economics
How much do storage and compute cost for Earth observation, and who earns from them?
Chapter summary
EO produces enormous volumes: the Copernicus archive alone runs to tens of petabytes, and a single commercial operator's archive to many petabytes.
Key takeaways
- 1
Storing, processing and serving it is a real cost, increasingly paid to cloud providers.
- 2
For operators, cloud costs are a modest share of spending but grow with archive size; for analytics firms, compute is usually a small share of revenue (about 2% in Setcoin's value-chain example) unless they process wide areas at high resolution frequently.
- 3
Cloud providers earn steadily from both and host public archives free to attract compute.
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