Big data centers, once viewed as mundane, now serve as major profit engines for tech giants like Google and Amazon. The surge in AI demands poses challenges for centralized infrastructures, which are often located far from end-users. As companies spend significant sums on cloud services, experts like Butian Li argue for a shift toward decentralized, peer-to-peer connectivity to combat the inefficiencies created by distance. This transformation could democratize access to computing power and improve overall performance for both retail and business users.
Big tech has been funneling billions into computing infrastructure to ensure they control distribution and access to the internet's backbone. Their edge is centralization—it gives them absolute control over efficiency, which is the public story, but pricing and data ownership are the private ones you don't hear about.
As more and more people use more and more computing for increasingly complicated tasks, having data centers hundreds of miles away no longer becomes viable. It's like having a taxi service that operates in a different city.
Instead of building massive centralized data centers, we need to optimize peer-to-peer connectivity, minimizing the distance data has to travel, thus enhancing both speed and cost-effectiveness.
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