Only a small fraction of that is spent on actually hosting the website. The rest goes into the pockets of the owners and their friends.
You can do a lot with very little if your primary goal isn't to enrich yourself.
Being a 503c, they're required to disclose their expenditures, among other things. CN gives them a perfect score, and the expense ratio section puts their program spend at 77.4% of the budget https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703#overall-ratin...
Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.
Scroll down to the "Statement of activities (audited)" section:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...
…across 650 employees, which is $166K on average.
With an order of magnitude less data to host, though. The entirety of Wikipedia is less than 1PB [1], while the entirety of IA is 175+ PB [2].
Traffic is relatively cheap, especially for a very cache-friendly website like Wikipedia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports...
If you look at the audited financial report of last year.
$3,474,785 was spent on hosting. Which makes sense its basically a static site.
This is out of expenses of $190,938,007
Thats about 1.8%. This is not new. Its been the case for years. Wikipedia has never had very high hosting costs. Its always been going into their grants or whatever else.
Despite the nonsense about AI overloading their servers even if it doubled the load it would barely affect the budget.