alt Hacker News> Latency for interaction with AI?
It's not just AI. Video streaming or game streaming both depend on close proximity to the end user, alone because the data volume would completely overwhelm backhaul links... that's why Youtube, Netflix and a lot of CDNs all have colo facilities close to major population centers and their regionally dominant ISPs.
It can be significantly cheaper to pay colo fees at an ISP' s data center than to pay interconnection fees for bulk transfers.
> Video streaming or game streaming both depend on close proximity to the end user
That's a straw man for this discussion. Yes, there will be a need to place some DCs close to users, but most of them could be located closer to energy production, attached to a backbone network, and the vast majority of customers would not suffer any degradation of service from it.