The internet is getting harder to archive because the AI boom has caused a storage crisis, with both NAND and mechanical drives facing shortages. The same large-capacity HDDs now cost up to 3x more due to shriveled production capacities that have otherwise been entirely booked out by hyperscalers . These rising prices have made it difficult to preserve data at the usual rate across the industry, as reported by 404 Media . The Internet Archive, whose mission is to provide "universal access to all knowledge," is one of the organizations affected by this crisis. It holds around 210 petabytes of archives, with another 100 terabytes added every day to collections like the Wayback Machine. Amidst the AI boom, maintaining it has become "a very real issue costing us time and money," founder Brewster Kahle told 404 Media . Archiving the internet shares the same first step — it needs to extract information in order to preserve it, but website operators have been increasingly blocking such efforts .…