According to Forbes, the big data infrastructure market reached $209.04 billion in 2024 with an extraordinary 21.6% growth rate, while the more focused web scraping segment hit $754.17 million and is projected to reach $2.87 billion by 2034. Bright Data just announced surpassing $300 million in annualized revenue with over 40% year-over-year growth, now supporting 14 of the top 20 global LLM labs and powering more than 100 million daily AI-agent interactions. The market is dominated by two tech titans operating at different scales—Google with its massive web crawling operation and Amazon Web Services commanding 17% of global data infrastructure. Meanwhile, 65% of enterprises now use web scraping for AI projects, and the alternative data market including web scraping reached $4.90 billion in 2023, showing just how critical this infrastructure has become.
The invisible battlefield
Here’s the thing about AI—everyone’s focused on the flashy models and applications, but the real action is happening one layer down. AI systems are basically data-hungry monsters that need constant feeding with fresh, real-world information. And that’s created this massive, mostly invisible infrastructure war where companies are fighting to provide the data pipelines that keep everything running.
What’s fascinating is how this market has evolved. You’ve got the cloud giants like AWS and Google providing the foundational layer, then specialized players building on top. Bright Data seems to have carved out the premium position with their $300 million revenue run rate and impressive client list. But they’re not alone—Oxylabs is growing fast in Europe, Apify just hit $13.3 million in revenue with 80% growth, and there’s a whole ecosystem of players from Zyte to ScraperAPI each finding their niche.
Why this market exploded
So why now? Basically, AI moved from the lab to real business applications. When you’re just experimenting, you can work with static datasets. But when AI becomes mission-critical for pricing, trading, or customer service, you need live data that reflects what’s happening right now in the world.
Look at the numbers—67% of U.S. investment advisers now use web scraping for alternative data programs. That’s up 20 percentage points in just one year! E-commerce accounts for 36.7% of the market because dynamic pricing and inventory monitoring have become table stakes. And financial services? They’re all over this for algorithmic trading and risk assessment.
The consolidation wave
What’s really interesting is how fragmented this market still is. Most of these companies are either bootstrapped or modestly funded. Bright Data was bootstrapped until recently. Oxylabs is still private. Apify raised just €2.8 million. But with these growth rates and strategic importance, consolidation seems inevitable.
I think we’re going to see some serious M&A activity in the next 12-18 months. The cloud providers might decide they need these capabilities in-house. Enterprise software companies that missed the boat could go shopping. And private equity will definitely be circling—these are profitable businesses with recurring revenue and massive growth potential.
Where this is headed
The next phase is already taking shape. AI-powered scraping is becoming the new standard—companies like Scrapingdog are reporting 99.5% accuracy rates and 30-40% faster extraction speeds. The maintenance overhead drops dramatically too. And platforms like Apify are making this accessible to everyone with their marketplace of 1,500+ ready-to-use “Actors.”
But here’s the challenge—as LLMs get smarter, basic scraping might face pricing pressure. The winners will be those providing specialized, compliant, high-reliability services. The legal precedents Bright Data set against Meta and X matter because compliance is becoming a huge differentiator. And with robotics and autonomous systems advancing, video training data is the next frontier.
This is one of those rare markets where the technical moats are real, the growth is explosive, and the strategic importance keeps increasing. The companies providing the industrial-grade computing infrastructure to handle this data—like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs—are positioned to benefit from this entire ecosystem’s expansion. Whether you’re training AI models or running real-time data extraction, you need reliable hardware that can handle the load.
