Do you know what a petabyte is?

Well, TransUnion — which filed for an IPO last week — has 30 of them, and that number has been growing 25% every year since 2010.

Those 30 petabytes (1 million gigabytes, for those of you who are not “Big Bang Theory” cast members) include data on 1 billion consumers worldwide. And TransUnion, which filed to go public last week, plans to continue growing its data on you in order to achieve a CAGR of 15% through 2018.

TransUnion taps 90,000 data sources to get its data. “We keep our data current by processing approximately 3.6 billion updates each month, and we continue to identify opportunities to acquire additional data,” the company says. This is a data behemoth that keeps exponentially ballooning.

TransUnion is consumer data writ large — very large. The company disclosed in its S-1 SEC filing this week that it has “recently made significant investments to transition our technology infrastructure to the latest big data and analytics technologies” to handle its ever-increasing load of data. It seems the changes have allowed the company to speed up product development to “days” from “weeks.”

The trick is cost. TransUnion maintains that its enhancements, which it calls a “next-generation platform,” provide enhanced performance “while at the same time lowering our overall cost structure.”

In the end, what is startling about TransUnion’s IPO filing is that it gives a window into a massive data trend that has, to date, largely been suggested, but not confirmed. Here’s how TransUnion described the current data-driven economy:

Larger and more diversified datasets are now assembled faster while the breadth of analytical applications and solutions has expanded. … The proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices … generates enormous amounts of data tied to consumers, activities and locations. We believe that the demand for targeted data and sophisticated analytical solutions will continue to grow meaningfully as businesses seek real-time access to more granular views of consumer populations and more holistic views on individual consumers.

In other words, the more we do mobile, the more petabytes. Sounds like the plot of a “Big Bang Theory” episode.