There's a really great episode of Linear Digressions[0] (a Data Science podcast) that goes into the different scales of data that exist in the world. Everyone thinks of Google and Facebook as Big Data, but the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder collects 7.5B TB of data per second!
It's not a secret that in the process of automatic manufacturing there are terabytes of data produced in a matter of minutes. OF course how many of such data is of any use is another story, but anyway it still requires storage and processing power capable of handling that volumes.