Have you seen some of the numbers that are being floated around?

The investment that is being made by Big Tech into data centers is enormous. We are looking at mind numbing totals.

Amazon spent an impressive $19B on data centers in 2024. That number is going to top $100B in 2025.

Meta announced they are looking at investing $10B into ScaleAI, the largest investment in a private company to date.

The Stargate Project has Arm, Microsoft, OpenAi, Oracle, and Nvidia dropping a cool half a trillion dollars over the next four years. That breaks down to $125B each year.

All this money is basically for infrastructure. There really are no money-making ventures as a direct result of this investment. Of course, without the infrastructure, the rest is not possible. These companies are intent on building applications using the data, offering services to their users, hopefully driving a profit.

Whether that is achieved remains to be seen. However, we can presume, given the quality of the companies involved, they are flying totally blind. In other words, they have some idea what they are doing.

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Hundreds of Billions Flowing Into Data Centers: Why Decentralization is so Important

We know what Big Tech is after.

They have a history of profiting from network effects. Their goal is to get people onto their platforms and keep them there. Naturally, this is Business 101. However, the control comes from a monopolistic type practice where the data is only available on that network. Nowhere else can anyone find the answers they seek.

We saw this materialize in a number of ways during the Internet era.

Google might be the best example of this, since they have the most data. In the 1990s, they started indexing the entire web. They were able to scrape all the data that was being generated by sites, something it used to feed its search engine.

This led to not only a domination of search but also maps and email. Today, that same data is being used to train its AI.

The question that everyone is being confronted with is what will things look like in the AI age?

Big Tech is very obvious with their outlook. Their goal is to replicate what took place before. If they can keep the monopoly on data going, people will have few options. Their services will simply be more advanced due to the fact we are dealing with more data, larger GPU clusters, and better algorithms.

To many, this could result in a dystopian future.

It is also the crossroads humanity finds itself at.

Decentralized Data

The billions of dollars being invested to house the world's data is not being done for altruistic reasons. These companies are well aware of the value it is generating. Few can argue that data is part of the future's foundation.

While energy is required to power it all, without data, there is no need for a data center. GPUs need something to process. That is why it is the crucial element in everything that is being proposed.

As the digital and physical worlds converge, data will be fed into the real world environment. At the same time, we will also see data extraction from that realm.

Most of us can guess who is seeking to control this domain.

Hence, the crossroads for humanity. Do we want a future where those entities that can drop tens of billions of dollars are the winners due to their size? In a networked world, is money going to be the determining factor?

If data is part of the foundation, everyone should question where it is being directed. Each time we log onto a device (or site), that data is heading somewhere. How often do we consider where that is?

With social media, we can quickly assess who is benefitting. The platform owners own both the client and the server system. Input through their applications means you are filling their data centers.

You would think they would at least send a thank you message.

Decentralized data is becoming a talking point for many. This is something we started discussing a couple years ago. It is evident that we have to use blockchain to house data that is not under the control of Big Tech. This is the only way start ups and other companies are going to be able to fuel that AI ventures.

Without data a company only has expensive computers that are doing little.

This is where individuals can start to exert some control. The pushback is not easy but it can happen. Decentralized (and open source) options have to be used as often as possible. Naturally, we cannot get away from Big Tech's hold on most internet related activities. What we can do, however, is to shift the tide a bit.

Each piece of data that resides outside of these major corporations is another step forward. The entire process will require hundreds of trillions of steps but we have to start somewhere.

It is an arms race and data is one of the core pieces. Big Tech is spending hundreds of billions to house the data they are accumulating.

What is humanity doing?