system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does YouTube have the space to hold thousands and thousands of videos? Even then having some of those videos in 4k which would take up a ton if space on a traditional harddrive.
gpt
They use a ton of HDDs :D  Basically they are held on a server farm.  Which can hold petabytes of information.  Though Youtube now has 100s of petabytes worth of info..  and youtube infrastructure is complicated!

As youtube uses a pretty complicated distribution method for its data. when a standard person uploads a video, it only gets stored in the most local data center. this is why when you watch a video with very little views, it often buffers a bunch and takes forever to load.  As view count increases, copies of the data are distributed to relevant data centers around the world. this is why ads and extremely popular content loads extremely quickly.