If you've been to Microsoft's website to download Windows recently, you might have noticed something odd: the installation files are much bigger than they used to be. It's not a glitch or a bad internet connection. The company's Windows ISO downloads have been steadily growing, and the most likely explanation is AI.
The Size Increase at a Glance
Data from deployment specialists and independent analysis shows that the multi-edition ISO files offered through Microsoft's Visual Studio subscriptions have grown from around 4 GB at the original release of Windows 10 in 2015 to more than 8 GB for the latest Windows 11 25H2 release in July 2026. That's a doubling in size in just over a decade.
Even the consumer-oriented Media Creation Tool, which builds a bootable USB drive or downloads an ISO for installation, now produces a file around 6.8 GB. The original Windows 10 ISO from 2015 was roughly half that.
A recent chart from Michael Niehaus, a Windows deployment expert who spent 16 years at Microsoft, illustrates the trend clearly. In the chart, he tracked the size of multi-edition ISOs from the first Windows 11 24H2 release in November 2024 through the 25H2 update in July 2026. Over that span of less than two years, almost 6,000 new folders and over 20,000 new files were added to the installer payload.
Is This Growth Just Normal Evolution?
Windows has always faced accusations of bloat. Twenty years ago, reviewers described Windows XP as a "monstrous, bloated brute" that required two gigabytes of hard disk space. At the time, that seemed like an enormous amount. The complaints have never really disappeared, but for most of the past two decades, the solution was simple: add more hardware. PCs kept getting cheaper, storage and RAM became more affordable, and the bloat was easy to ignore.
That may not be possible in the current hardware climate. Memory and storage prices have spiked due to supply chain issues and increased demand for AI-related components. The days of being able to ignore the growing footprint on the premise that "you can just buy a bigger drive" may be over.
Microsoft's own minimum requirement for Windows 11 remains 64 GB of system storage. That number might have seemed reasonable a few years ago, but it is increasingly unrealistic. In a test, installing Windows 11 on a VM with a 64 GB virtual drive resulted in peak storage usage of 28.2 GB just for the operating system and the latest updates. That leaves only about 35 GB for applications and user files, which is hardly enough for most real-world workloads.
The AI Connection
Source: ZDNET News