Seen a lot of cloud plots for sale recently - and no I am DEFINITELY not interested in them - just that they must be non viable by now
Netspace was back up to 48% growth last week and looking to top that this week.
It has slowed from over 100% weekly, but 40-50% a week seem to be holding pace for now.
I read today that only about 20% of HDDs are sold retail. The rest are pre-sold to corporations.
I would bet that the biggest commercial whales still have a lot of TiB to fill. They made corporate HDD purchases before the craze.
Your title is inverted maybe - but I agree - the most logical explanation I can think of for the massive initial netspace growth is people spinning up huge cloud plotters, and now stuck with plots in the cloud that they cannot afford to keep and that no sane person would buy.
Most organisations do not have EBs or even PBs of ‘spare’ space - if they have it it’s cold or redundant, not hot and unused - do you know how big an EB really is? An EB (of 16TB disks) weighs 42 metric tons - most non-cloud companies don’t have anything like that sitting around ‘unused’.
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Update as I am out of edits:
I did not refresh and gave incorrect information.
Netspace went up 25% last week and seems to be holding around 20-30% a week.
I also notice that rapid netspace growth seemed to collapse around the end of the month, around the time people would be seeing their first cloud bill in hard figures rather than projected figures 
Maybe I’m wrong - maybe there is still this massive amount of disks spinning every day in corps and homes, purchased unnecessarily, just waiting for Chia to come along. But personally - I’ve worked in a lot of places, places with on-prem datacenters and places that did everything in the cloud, and we’ve never bought things that weren’t strictly needed in (max) the next 12 months.
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I wish I had any real idea of where network growth was going and why but I’m not that smart. 
I hope it continues to slow …
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Eh, you’re smart enough not to think that cloud plotting would be viable, hopefully smart enough not spend money you can’t afford to lose, everything else is as much a gamble as assuming the USD or whatever local currency you use will be worth what it is today tomorrow.
As long as you’re not making your future more difficult, you’re smart.
Just a fun hobby now. Discouraging peeps from paying for cloud storage was effort well spent.
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The dip in price won’t help but the most expensive mechanisms will be losing shine first - and that is cloud plots - they paid off in the earlier days and they will hurt first and hurt bad. They are even more expensive for the fact that they are probably gonna be scrapped as they drop through the threshold
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In our work meeting somtimes there is a discussion about cost of cloud services. Cloud storage and bandwidth is outrageously expensive. With current Chia price and how slow you earn, I don’t think cloud plotting is affordable very long.
Chia winning seems be just matter of luck. Many times I have thought selling hard drives but then stopped thinking maybe I will make some money in pool.
I did a rough calculation here considering electricity prices only
so at $350 exchange rate, the electricity break even is still at about 1500 EiB