Internet archival sites struggling to preserve the internet because of skyrocketing hard drive prices due to the AI boom — Wayback Machine and Wikimedia punished by stratospheric storage pricing and stricter anti-scraping measures blocking the wrong bots

AI infrastructure demand is tightening supplies of hard drives and memory, driving up storage costs for archiving groups.

The Internet Archive, Wikimedia, and other preservation projects say order delays are getting longer and budgets are under pressure.

At the same time, more sites are blocking scraper-like bots, which makes legitimate web archiving harder.

The result: the same AI boom that fuels growth is also making it tougher to preserve public web history and knowledge.