This article originally appeared in the Knoxville News Sentinel on October 28, 2025.
By Ozlem Kilic, Vice Provost and Founding Dean
Data is everywhere, but only those who understand it can harness its power. It is now the language of progress, and fluency in that language is becoming the new literacy of the digital age.
Every time we shop, drive, stream, diagnose, invest, farm, or travel, we generate data. In 2024, humanity created, copied, or consumed roughly 149 zettabytes of data. More than 90 percent of all data has been produced in just the past two years, and the total volume is doubling roughly every four years.¹
To understand what 149 zettabytes means, let’s start with one gigabyte. A single gigabyte can hold about 200 songs, or 30 minutes of HD video, or roughly 1,000 photos. Now, multiply that by 149 trillion. That is how much data we generated in 2024 alone. If each gigabyte were a star, we would create a digital galaxy with 149 trillion stars, more than 350 times larger than the Milky Way.
We are not just producing information. We are generating entire galaxies. But who will navigate them?
Data has become the nutrient of the next economic boom, and artificial intelligence is its hungriest consumer. AI systems crave massive, diverse, and trustworthy data sets to learn, adapt, and generate insights that drive decisions in healthcare, finance, logistics, cybersecurity, manufacturing, entertainment, agriculture, energy, national defense, and urban planning.
23,000 job openings each year to handle the data we generate
But data alone does not guarantee progress. Without accuracy, interpretation, and responsibility, it can mislead as easily as it can empower. The real value emerges in how we gather, store, access, verify, interpret, communicate, and use it to predict outcomes while protecting it with ethics, security and privacy in mind. That requires a workforce capable of operating at intersections, blending applied computing with curiosity, analytics with storytelling, technology with ethics, and logic with human judgment.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of data scientists is projected to grow 34 percent between 2024 and 2034, with more than 23,000 openings each year and a median annual salary exceeding $112,000.² In Tennessee, data-oriented roles are among the fastest-growing career fields through 2032.³
Power demand is predicted to double in next 5 years
The infrastructure powering this transformation is also expanding rapidly. According to market analysis from firms such as JLL, the global data-center industry is on track to double power demand over the next five years, reaching about 100 gigawatts. Analysts estimate that more than 6 gigawatts of new colocation capacity were already under construction at the end of 2024, with over 22 gigawatts further planned. Advanced artificial-intelligence workloads are projected to grow at roughly 30 percent annually and may account for around 70 percent of all new data-center capacity by 2030.⁴
Tennessee is at the center of the data-science movement
The U.S. Department of Energy has officially designated the Oak Ridge Reservation as one of four federal sites selected for new AI-driven data center and energy infrastructure development and has issued a formal request for proposals for companies to build and operate these facilities.⁵ The Tennessee Valley Authority provides one of the most resilient energy grids in the nation. Data centers are already emerging across Knoxville, Nashville, and Chattanooga.
The future will belong to those who can connect, question, humanize, and secure data. As the university’s first undergraduate intercollegiate degree, the Data Science program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s College of Emerging and Collaborative Studies prepares students to think and lead at the intersections of computing, analytics, engineering, business, education, health, communication, and societal impact.
The future will be led by those who can translate data into insight, insight into action, and action into progress. Tennessee has the scientific infrastructure and the momentum. With deliberate investment in talent, we can move from participating in the data economy to steering it.
Footnotes
- Rivery Analytics, “Big Data Statistics: How Much Data Is There in the World?” (2024).
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Data Scientists (2024–2034).
- ProjectionsCentral, Long-Term Occupational Projections for Tennessee (https://projectionscentral.org/longterm).
- Based on JLL data reported in its North American Data Center Report and summarized by DataCenterDynamics (2024).
- U.S. Department of Energy announcement on federal AI data center site designations and RFP release for Oak Ridge facilities (2025).