Nominating this as the best opening line I have read in a while.
The article does raise an important question though - would an AWS data center be considered a civilian target or military?
With all the money and assets and the whole value of business, the Big Tech has already started to move into energy, and i think the defense, starting with self-defense, will be among the nearest-future next domains they will move into.
Yeah the use consumer grade rocket components made SpaceX become viable compared to bloated rocket companies. Short range anti missile systems are not large ordinance, they rely a lot on technology for tracking targeting, and they are not a "weapon" (as in they prevent damage not cause it except inadvertently) so it actually seems like something pretty feasible for a tech company. Build it with consumer grade hardware and you could deploy a ton of them.
Rentable defense is already a thing, but rapidly deployable mini-interceptors like Anduril and many others, or electronic countermeasures could plausibly become much more widespread.
don't forget the amount of power available in the datacenter. You can easily redirect say just mere megawatts to electronic countermeasures (would shut everything around down) or microwave and laser weapons. That for example is just 60KWt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvQV7Mt02q4
- local data residency & sovereignty
- latency
- bandwidth
- regulatory climate
- competition
all cloud providers have middle east presence
refineries generate terabytes of sensor data per hour
the population and people there produce and consume a lot of data