26/06/2026 in News, Views from Echelon
From 2 exabytes of data to one viral moment: the connectivity powering World Cup 2026
It’s 6.30am on a quiet street in Boston and Mike Morrison is awakened by the sound of a jet-lagged bagpiper across the road serenading local residents from outside an Airbnb house bedecked in Scotland flags. The World Cup has arrived in town.
Amused, rather than annoyed, by the disturbance, Morrison filmed the scene and posted the video online. Within hours, thousands of football fans around the world were sharing the video across social media – quickly followed by local and international media. It has been viewed almost 10 million times so far – turning Morrison into an unlikely character in just one of thousands of remarkable human stories the World Cup has thrown up so far.
It was just a small moment which captures something important about the modern World Cup. Twenty years ago, the story would have been a anecdote shared among a handful of friends. Today, a smartphone and a social media platform can transform a local encounter into a global story in a matter of hours.
Supporters traditionally experienced World Cups through television broadcasts and newspaper coverage. Today, they can also follow the action through digital streams, podcasts, fan channels, and messaging platforms. Fans are no longer simply watching the World Cup; now they are helping to create it.
FIFA estimates that around five billion people engaged with content from the 2022 World Cup across television and digital platforms. Fans generated almost 94 million social media posts, resulting in 260 billion social media impressions.
World Cup 2026 will dwarf those figures.
Driven by real-time mobile phone usage from fans streaming matches and sharing content simultaneously, the tournament conversation is projected to accumulate 1.3 trillion potential impressions across social media by the final match.
The final is expected to account for up to 7% of all global traffic, demonstrating the massive shift from linear TV to digital streaming. That’s 850 to 900 petabytes of data, or the equivalent of the maximum network bandwidth capacity of roughly 33-45 hyper-scale 100MW data centres operating simultaneously.
Fans inside the stadium are expected to consume more than 50 terabytes of data – at each match – with more than 2 exabytes of data expected to generated cumulatively during the tournament from match streams, AI simulations, direct data, and social content.
The rise of content creators is perhaps the clearest illustration of how the relationship between fans and major events has changed. Online celebrities such as IShowSpeed attract audiences measured in the tens of millions.
Every video uploaded from a stadium, every reaction on social media, every message sent between friends, every livestream watched by supporters around the world becomes part of the biggest (digital) event in history.
Connectivity and data is also transforming what happens on the pitch. Teams use performance tracking, video analytics and technology to monitor player fitness, manage workloads and recovery, and prepare for opponents. Every sprint, pass and change of direction generates information that can be used to improve decision-making.
The media experience has undergone an equally dramatic transformation. Modern broadcasts are powered by live statistics, player tracking information, automated highlights and real-time analysis – all of it accessible from a smartphone anywhere in the world.
So what connects a Scottish bagpiper in Boston, a creator livestreaming from a stadium in New York, a coach analysing player performance, and a broadcaster delivering live statistics to millions of viewers?
The answer is data. More specifically, it is the digital infrastructure that allows data to be stored, processed and moved around the world in real time.
At Echelon Data Centres, this is the work we think about. We develop and operate the large-scale digital infrastructure that sits beneath moments like these: the campuses where streams are processed, cached and delivered. Every social media post, livestream, ticket scan, replay, player performance metric, AI-powered insight, and online interaction depends on a network of digital infrastructure operating behind the scenes. Data centres have become as essential to the modern World Cup as stadiums, transport systems and television cameras.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the story isn’t that Morrison’s video went viral. It’s where it led. He shared food, drink and laughs with his temporary neighbours, exchanged messages with fans he had never met, became an honorary member of the Tartan Army and was gifted a ticket to watch Scotland at the World Cup.
His story is a perfect snapshot for the modern World Cup: a local moment becoming a global experience through the power of connectivity. A moment you can admire thanks to the digital infrastructure you never had to think about.
