Installer Steam
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Then there is the size of data that will be affected, that is the bigger number.
Downloads are compressed and encrypted, processing that data needs some space.
Additionally, all files that are going to be updated/patched are copied. So if a large amount of data is going to be affected by an update, you need a large amount of free space, temporarily, to do so.
The installer/patcher contains a mix of the raw files and those that get generated, and perhaps some scripts to synchronize your settings with the Steam Cloud once its 'done'.
The specifics are intentionally not revealed so most end users will not ever know for sure whats in the download itself. Also their mechanism changed and they called their newer download mechanism 'steam pipe'.
While the download is happening, the new updated files that are being constructed and the old files which will be replaced temporarily coexist, so you temporarily need a little extra space while the download is happening. Once the download is done, the old files are erased and replaced with the new files.
And onto what the other posters got wrong:
Decompression and decryption all happens in memory (i.e. RAM), no extra disk space is required.
That is not what it does.
No. There's not an installer. Steam has manifests which specify how the files are constructed out of blocks, it compares the manifests for the old and new versions to work out which blocks it already has, and which it needs to download. It grabs those blocks individually from the content servers; there's no monolithic installer.
People have reverse-engineered what it does, there's at least one third-party reimplementation of the download system.
For reference, the "newer" mechanism is still about ten years old at this point.