The Internet is almost 100% packet switching, a technique that someone brilliant in ARPA came up with the idea of claiming it was intended for nuclear warfare survival, in order to ensure funding.

“Data centers” need not be hyper-centralized. There’s an economy of scale of course, both in the building itself and in very local transmission. But all scale curves have knees, and one is survivability.

It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.