alt Hacker NewsThe problem is that at that scale, the alternative is building your own data centers. You'd probably want at least 2 in the US, 2 in Europe, 2 in Asia, maybe 1 in Africa and 1 in LATAM. So 8-10, and you need at least half of them ready "on time."
What does "on time" mean? You'll need to negotiate with local authorities, some friendly, some not. Data centers aren't exactly popular neighbors these days. Then negotiate with the local power utility. Fingers crossed the political landscape doesn't shift and your CEO doesn't sign a contract with an army using your product to pick bombing targets, because you'll watch those permits evaporate fast.
Then there's sourcing: CPUs, GPUs, memory, networking. You need all of it. Did you know the lead time for an industrial power transformer is 5+ years? Don't get me started on the water treatment pumps and filters you can't even get permitted without. What will you do in the meantime ? You surely aren't gonna get preferential treatment from AWS / Google / ... if they know you are moving away anyway. Your competition will.
The risk and complexity are just too big. AI/LLM is already an incredibly complex and brittle environment with huge competition. Getting distracted building data centers isn't enticing for these companies, it's a death sentence.
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Other than data sovereignty, does the data center location really matter that much? Current inference systems are not exactly low latency.
Take the approach Geohot is suggesting. Take a shipping container, make a standard layout, cooling and compute load. Find a cheap source of electricity.. Place it and have compute.
not sure what you are describing, however a random item is that in 2026 low-tech Chile is building sixty datacenters in or near Santiago, in the business news.
Translation: Antropic never intends to spend $100 billion on AWS.
Every single argument you've brought up is irrelevant in the face of billions of dollars. If you intend to consume $100 billion dollars in data center infrastructure, you're going to find a way to accomplish it while cutting out the middlemen.
Meanwhile if you're flaky and never intend to spend that money, you're going to come up with a way to pay someone else to deal with those problems and quit paying the moment they don't.
You'd never do both at the same time. You'd never commit your money and give them control over your business critical infrastructure.
Hence the deal is a sham. The $100 billion are a lie. Thank you for telling us.
For AI inference you don't need to geographically distribute your data centers. Latency, throughput, and routes don't matter here. When it's 10 seconds for the first token and then a 1KB/sec streamed response, whatever is fine. You can serve Australia from the US and it'll barely matter. You can find a spot far outside populated areas with cheap power, available water, and friendly leadership, then put all of your data centers there. If you're worried about major disasters, you can pick a second city. You definitely don't need a data center in every continent.
You're not wrong about the rest but no AI company would ever build a data center in every continent for this, even if they were prepared to build data centers. AI inference isn't like general purpose hosting.