Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Super Bowl performance: We nailed it

Atlanta’s first Super Bowl in 19 years is in the books, and according to officials with Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the $1.5-billion stage our fair city exhibited to the world shattered expectations.

The stadium’s impressive oculus roof may have been closed for the majority of the Big Game, despite the NFL’s initial requests to keep it open, and the pricey serpentine bridge next door may have been off-limits to Regular Joes, but The Benz itself deftly handled its most high-profile event to date and set several records in the process, official announced today.

The Super Bowl LIII numbers have been tallied, and most notably, the February 3 event used about 24 terabytes of data—a new record for any single gathering in history.

For context, that’s the equivalent of 68 million selfies, and a 47 percent increase over data usage at Minneapolis’s Super Bowl just one year prior, per MBS statistics.

Officials credited the stadium’s use of all-fiberoptic technology with handling the data surge. More than 100 million people watched the game via television or streaming.

Meanwhile, Super Bowl patrons bought 117,400 beers at the game. That sounds impressive—it did mark a new single-event record at the coliseum—until you consider that more than 70,000 fans were there. Not exactly Spring Break for everybody.

Curbed Atlanta

Some other record numbers of note:

• More than 16,000 hot dogs, the Super Bowl’s most popular food item, were consumed, enough to cover 27 football fields;
• What wasn’t purchased and eaten—the equivalent of 6,610 meals—was donated to families in need across Atlanta;
• And more than 80,000 pounds of glass, aluminum, cardboard, and plastic was recycled.

Since opening to great fanfare in 2017 (and working the kinks out of the complex roof system last summer), The Benz has hosted more than 80 major events and four million guests.

The NCAA Men’s Final Four next year will mark the last of a trifecta of huge sporting championships (four, counting MLS’s final match in December) the stadium is credited with landing.