In the Erlang VM, each Erlang "process" has its own garbage collected heap [1]. There's also an ETS module for more efficiently storing and sharing large amounts of data, but data stored in ETS is not automatically garbage collected [2].

[1] https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/garbagecollection [2] https://www.erlang.org/doc/man/ets.html