Google datacenters are global. They store petabytes of data in each and are constantly evolving to Google Cloud customer needs and their own, meaning they are always expanding their storage network with new servers and drives.

In addition to the hardware expansion, YouTube engineers are experimenting with ways to encode videos in much more efficient formats, such as AV1. Basically, encoding is how a video is stored. The engineers are trying new standards to retain original video quality in much smaller file sizes, leading to more video storage capacity without the need to upgrade servers as quickly.